The role of international standards is more important to utilities outside of North America than to domestic utilities, finds a new study from Newton-Evans Research Co. While IEC standards compliance dominates system procurements and communications approaches internationally, in North America, the roles of IEEE, ANSI, NEMA and de facto standards play a much more important role.
Newton-Evans, which conducted surveys and interviews with more than 150 utilities in 37 countries, says that 40% of international respondents indicated having a requirement for open platform communications, compared with only 27% of North American replies. Similarly, service-oriented architecture was viewed as being much more important internationally than was reported by North American respondents.
In addition, the study says two-thirds of international utilities and 19% of North American utilities reported interest in using CIM standards for model maintenance related to distribution circuit design transfers from geographical information systems to distribution management systems.
