Clean Energy Ministerial

Overview

The International Smart Grid Action Network (ISGAN) creates a mechanism through which multinational stakeholders can collaborate on accelerating the development and deployment of smarter electric grids around the world. ISGAN promotes a dynamic exchange of knowledge and best practices, tool development, and project coordination. It aims to improve the understanding of smart grid technologies, practices, and systems and to promote adoption of related enabling government policies.

ISGAN activities center on those aspects of the smart grid where governments have regulatory authority, expertise, convening power, or other leverage, focusing on five principal areas:

• Policy, standards, and regulation
• Finance and business models
• Technology and systems development
• User and consumer engagement
• Workforce skills and knowledge

For more information, view the ISGAN fact sheet.

Goal

Smart grid represents a novel convergence of several different groups of technologies—traditional power sector transmission and distribution technologies, information and communication technologies, advanced power electronics and control devices, and sensing and monitoring technologies—and the operational practices to integrate these technologies into a unified system. ISGAN’s purpose is to help countries accelerate progress to their national-level smart grid goals and to facilitate their adoption of more ambitious targets.

Countries bring a diversity of drivers and approaches to the smart grid space, including integrating renewable energy, both transmission-scale and distributed; integrating plug-in electric vehicles; improving operational efficiency and system reliability; improving electricity market function; and differentiating electricity services for consumers.

Because of the diversity of drivers and technologies captured in the term "smart grid," it is difficult to identify a single, unified goal or metric that can capture the state of smart grid progress. (The United States alone tracks 20 key metrics in its biannual Smart Grid System Report.)

Through ISGAN’s projects, its participants hope to improve the understanding of these drivers and their implications on smart grid development and deployment, in an effort to identify an appropriate basket of metrics and corresponding tools for measuring progress internationally.

Progress

• In April 2011, ISGAN was established as an Implementing Agreement under the International Energy Agency. Fifteen countries have signed the Implementing Agreement to date. 
• In June 2011, ISGAN held its inaugural Executive Committee meeting in Seoul, Korea, at which four foundational projects were adopted. These projects will:
  • Inventory participants’ smart grid policies and activities
  • Develop comparable smart grid case studies
  • Improve benefit-cost analysis methodologies for smart grid and develop related tool kits
  • Develop a common vocabulary for discussing smart grid internationally and integrate the results of the above and related efforts into useful syntheses for decision makers
• ISGAN is developing several additional activities, including projects on transmission and distribution networks, renewables integration, and grid governance during the transition to a smart grid, as well as an international research facility network.
• ISGAN has increased cooperation with the Implementing Agreement for Electricity Networks Analysis, Research and Development (ENARD), including discussions of a potential merger.
• ISGAN and ENARD have scheduled a joint workshop in October 2011 in the Netherlands on "International Knowledge Exchange of Smart Grid Demonstration Projects." This follows workshops in Vienna (May 2011) and Seoul (June 2011) on the foundational projects listed above. 
• ISGAN has invited a number of countries to join, including the following Clean Energy Ministerial participants: Finland, Denmark, Spain, South Africa, and Brazil.