(Washington, DC) Utilities and telecom providers should establish a more productive dialog in order to better build the complex communications networks needed for the smart grid to emerge. That was one key message coming out of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) roundtable discussion held here as part of DOE’s RFI on utility communications needs.

“It has occurred to me that we’re not on all the same page,” DOE General Counsel Scott Blake Harris said, urging utilities and telecom providers, as well as regulators, to work together to make smart grid benefits a reality. “The goal is to open up a dialog.”

Lynne Ellyn, Senior Vice President and CIO, DTE Energy, discussed the benefits of new technologies and grid automation, which have “the potential to make us more reliable, more responsive.” DTE Energy spends a lot of time with their telecom partners, although utilities have exacting requirements, she said. “Make no mistake about it. This is tricky stuff.”

Ellyn also said that the fundamental differences between telecom and electricity networks are often overlooked. “The grid that moves electricity around is entirely different from the grid that moves phone calls around. Until we understand this difference, we’re going to make mistakes.”

Southern Company CIO Becky Blalock said her company needs to work more closely with technology partners. “One of the concerns I have is that we can’t do everything ourselves and we need partners.” But, the real question when it comes to telecom providers is reliability. “The reliability standards that utilities operate under are much more stringent than those for public carriers,” she said.

“We have 100% back-up power to all of our switch locations,” Mike Lanman, President Enterprise and Government, Verizon Wireless, countered, noting that Verizon has invested $100 billion in its networks over the past ten years. “We have come a long way in ten years as Verizon Wireless."

Even so, Verizon is keen to understand and explore utilities’ communications needs with a goal of figuring out how to best fulfill those needs. “That’s one reason we just funded a study with UTC,” Lanman said.

National Cable and Telecommunications Association CEO Kyle McSlarrow said that carriers and utilities have a lot in common. “I see two networks that are highly intelligent and I think a natural relationship exists.”

James Ingraham, Vice President of Strategic Research, Electric Power Board of Chattanooga (EPB) provided an overview of EPB’s full-service electricity and communications network. The fiber-based infrastructure built by EPB is capable of providing not only smart grid applications but also every kind of services, including voice, video and data, Ingraham said.

Like many of the other Roundtable participants, Ingraham warned of the challenges and steep costs of managing and storing the massive amounts of data that will flow from advanced grid technologies. “We will go from eleven million data points per year to six billion data points per year,” he said.

True smart grid innovation is contingent on massive amounts of data, according to Roy Perry, Director, Strategic Assessment CableLabs. Citing research done by vendors, Perry said “it became clear that if you give consumers a dashboard with real-time data, it can go a long way to helping them reduce energy consumption.”

Jim L. Jones, Vice President and CIO Great River Energy, a generation and transmission company that serves 28 small distribution customers, said that grid modernization should benefit all players in the energy delivery chain. “We want to invest in technologies that provide improvements for all of us.”

Commissioner Sherman Elliott from Illinois Commerce Commission suggested that the most cost-effective path for consumers and society is to leverage and strengthen existing public communications networks rather than build a lot of “skinny pipes” for each utility. “What we should be looking at from a policy perspective is to leverage what already exists,” Elliott said.