Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the ethernet and wellknown
technology visionary, once said, “Over the past 63 years,
we met world needs for cheap and clean information by building
the Internet. Over the next 63 years, we will meet world needs
for cheap and clean energy by building the Enernet.” The
Internet has resulted from revolutionary advances in
electronics, telecommunications and information technologies,
devices and applications. While it began as an Internet
connecting people, by 2008 it connected more things than
people. Its exponential growth has been primarily as an Internet
of Things. Cisco has predicted that 50 billion new connections
will be made in this Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020. The U.S.
electric utility grid has until now been a patchwork of
monolithic, weakly interconnected, synchronous AC grids
powered by a few thousand or so very large power plants that
are centrally monitored and controlled. For a variety of reasons
this legacy grid approach is proving to be non-viable for the
present and the future. It is being supplemented and may
ultimately be supplanted by many, smaller networks with
literally millions of distributed generation, storage, and energy
management nodes. The grid is literally exploding into a
network of things. Many consider it to be the largest example of
an Internet of Things. The Enernet will be the inevitable
convergence of the smart grid with the Internet of Things.
Utilities, their customers and non-utility will find it necessary to
plan, engineer and operate in the presence of orders of
magnitude more devices and systems (e.g., smart nodes on the
utility systems and, for consumers, smart thermostats,
appliances, PHEVs/EVs, distributed generation / storage,
premises monitoring, automation, and EMS, even transactive
energy markets)ultimately leading to billions of new points that
require monitoring, analysis and management. Meanwhile, the
Internet of Things steadily grows more ubiquitous, powerful,
economical and secure. It is an obviously attractive platform for
the smart grid or, as Metcalfe has said, the control plane for the
smart grid. The purpose of this paper is to discuss why and how
the production and utilization of electric energy will become
inseparable, even indistinguishable from the Internet of Things.