The vision of a smart, wired world of connected buildings, vehicles and energy requires the systems within each component to mesh with each other and with the greater network that connects them all. Compatibility isn't enough, devices and systems need to function well together for the smart grid to work.

A new lab set up by the Dutch energy consulting and certification firm KEMA intends to help ensure that by testing the interoperability of smart grid products and services.

As Harry Stephey of KEMA notes, smart grid devices can be "compatible or certified or compliant with a particular spec, but that doesn't mean that they're interoperable when you put them all together..."

"That's basically the difference between compatibility and interoperability," Stephey, the project manager at KEMA's new Smart Grid Interoperability Laboratory, says in a company video about the facility.

The lab, located in space leased from Duke Energy in Erlanger, Kentucky, opened just last week; KEMA Vice President Ron Chebra chatted with me on Tuesday about the latest venture by the 84-year-old firm.

The interop lab, like the company's certification unit, is to provide vendor-neutral, objective services. "Vehemently objective," according to Chebra. The lab offers testing of a single device, or any number of them, to see if they will work well in a specific system, or in concert with each other and a broader network. The company anticipates its clients will be both vendors and utilities.

The idea isn't to wipe out the need for all smart grid pilots.

"What we're looking to do is supplement, or augment, or displace the need for a technical pilot," said Chebra. "We're not going to be piloting customer portals."

The KEMA team doesn't dispute the need for such real-world tests. Their aim is to make sure system elements can actually do the work that's intended before being tried in the market. As Stephey puts it: "If instead of having to buy 10,000 meters and 10 square miles of radio coverage and a half-million dollars worth of computers to find out it doesn't work, it would be nice if we could do that in a controlled environment."

While other interoperability lab services are available, KEMA's lab has an actual hookup to a live circuit so that its tests and simulations are not merely theoretical. Also, Chebra said, KEMA intends to draw on its network of testing centers as well as other facilities to build a "federation of laboratories" to inform the interop lab's work.

Image Credits - Top photo of city traffic at night via Shutterstock.com. Inset image courtesy of KEMA.