The NASPI (North American SynchroPhasor Initiative) working group brings together power engineers and other people from electric utilities, from power equipment vendors, and from academia. NASPI's objective is to improve the reliability, throughput, efficiency, and economics of the electric power grid by accelerating the widespread deployment of devices called PMUs (Phasor Measurement Units). A PMU makes fine-grained time-synchronized measurements of the electrical state of a particular point on the grid.

On February 20-21, 2013, I attended the Working Group meeting of NASPI  (the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative) in Huntington Beach, California. This Working Group includes several hundred EEs and a few computer scientists, working towards standardization and deployment of instrumentation for monitoring and control of electric power transmission grids around the world. The goal is a significant increase in reliability and efficiency of high voltage transmission.

In 2002, Dave Clark, John Wroclawski, Karen Sollins, and I wrote an ACM SIGCOMM conference paper entitled "Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet".