Historically when electricity markets were provisioned by single government owned entities, each network could be managed with unique and monolithic software systems. In comparison, the trend today to deregulate electricity markets requires a growing number of independent market participants to interact, which in turn requires
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The U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) put the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in charge of coordinating development of protocols and model standards to achieve interoperability of Smart Grid devices and systems. The U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Energy met with executives from Smart Grid industries to commit to supporting NIST in this endeavour with a $3.4 billion in government grants and $4.7 billion from private companies. NIST ran public workshops encompassing 1,500 individual Smart Grid stakeholders to produce a document [2] defining sixteen Priority Action Plans of which three encompassed the IEC 61970 Common Information Model (IEC-CIM) (refer Table 2-2 [3]).
The market for Smart Grid-related hardware, software, and services was forecast in 2009 to be $43 billion for the U.S. in 2014 and $171 billion globally. There has** to be a market for helping energy utilities to understand and convert their legacy software to the new interoperable Standards, and to track the history of model revisions for which Moose might be an appropriate tool. For example, [7] indicates about $140M in research funding that at least touches IEC 61970.
Enterprise Architect is being quite smart about it - getting in bed with standards organisations utilising MDA to produce industry information models [4]. Thus everyone that wants to interoperate with anyone else in these domains needs to use the International Standard, and EA is there ready to help by providing a free viewer. Indeed the IEC-CIM is maintained as a UML model [5] using EA, and the dozen IEC 61970 standards documents are generated from the model. (btw buying the dozen or so IEC 61970 Standards Documents probably costs a few grand [5], but the CIM model is free to download (see attached screen snapshot) for universities after signing up to the CIM User Group [6])
** Except where I live the opportunities are not so great having one small 3GW grid with 4 main generation operators versus the European 1023GW grid with 41 generation operators interconnected over 35 countries.