Request For Proposal

For A National

“Intelligent Utility Grid”

A Smart Grid For Both Electricity And Water

A PPP Between

The Maxcess Foundation

And

Sovereign Government

The Maxcess Foundation

Perspective

Location

Quality Assurance

Regulatory and Legal Requirements

Acronyms and Definitions

Bidding

The Project Specifications

1.Power Generation Plant (bulk & distributed), 1GW +

2.Transport & Distribution Grid (1,000+ Miles)

3.Advanced Metering, (up to 1.5 Million Customers)

4.Smart Grid OS and NOC

5.Project Term

6.General Information and Requirements

7.Disclosure of Interest

8.Proposal Submission Required Elements

The Maxcess Foundation

The Maxcess Foundation [“MFI”] was established in 2007 and began its operations in 2008 with the establishment of its initial endowment from private philanthropic donors. Today’scommitment from sponsors is in excess of $2.5 Billion from which MFI has created a number of grant programs to support its initiatives and those of other support organizations, which include SGOs, NGOs, educational institutions (both public and private) and research institutes.

Globally, in Developed Countries infrastructure is in dire need of repair or replacement. As an example, the power industry is in desperate need of modification and capacity expansion to keep up with demand.Many states and governments globally have also mandated requirements for new emission standards and minimum renewable energy production quotas.

We are very near the tipping point where demand will soon exceed supply and rate increases may no longer be counted on to meet infrastructure capital requirements. It is up to the private sector to bridge the gap.

MFI’s programs support those organizations in achieving their upgrade and capacity expansion plans. In many developing countries dependable essential infrastructure is non-existent. This makes it possible to Design and Build comprehensive new Technology for Infrastructure Solutions from the ground up.

MFI’s Infrastructure Programs address not just the immediate need of upgrade and construction but long-term operation and sustainability of the infrastructure’s entire life-cycleallowing minimum environmental impact. Our business models and intellectual property allow for maximum measurable benefits to individuals, institutions and communities.

The following systems specifications are broad definitions of utility infrastructure technology which does not yet exist. Consequently,MFI is subsidizing all up front R & D costs of all participating OEMs. OEMs are expected to design and build pursuant to the project specifications and provide the necessary long-term support over the project’s 30-year lifecycle with any and all upgrades when needed, also subsidized by MFI.

MFIis paying for 100% of all infrastructure development costs on behalf of Sovereign Government. This is a cooperative collaboration between a Sovereign Government and its private partner (MFI) via Public Private Partnership.

Perspective

Please Note For This RFP:

  • MFI owns the communication and information technology network (C&ITN), optical fiber and wireless digital network, which shall integrate and provide connectivity for Utility Grid OS.
  • MFI owns the Production Generation Plants.
  • MFI owns the Transport and Distribution Grid.
  • MFI owns the Substations, Conversion Stations andControlCenters.
  • MFI owns the PIADS (Premise Integrated Access Device).
  • MFI owns the “Embeded Sensor Network”.
  • MFI owns the Energy Storage Systems.
  • MFI owns the Operating System for the “Intelligent Utility Grid” OS.
  • MFI owns the OS Software.
  • MFI is the owner until PPP is completed and operational then ownership of specific portions of the infrastructure shall be transferred to Sovereign Government on the timetable agreed between MFI and the Sovereign.
  • MFI shall still be responsible for payinglong-term PPA subsidies on behalf of Sovereign Government and for customers that can not otherwise afford services.

All Companies Bidding must fully understand the relevance of the above. This means that the MFIRFP shall be built to the highest standards without compromise to legacy technologies. The MFI RFP shall be provided with more than enough bandwith (wired/ wireless) conectivity, as it will sit on MFI’s dedicated C&ITN (high bandwith low latency). The C&ITN shall provide MFI’s “Intelligent Utility Grid” with more than adequate capcity, power, personel, security, infrastructure and source code to operate on,i.e., 1Gbps bandwidth connectivity to each MFIPIAD. All Customer data shall be protected by MFI while allowing customers to manage their use.

As owner we set specifications, terms, prices and define services on our own infrastructure. Specification considerations are not made by an assumed set of third party limitations, i.e., legacy infrastructure, cost structures, current business models, pricing models or anyother type of limited resource consideration.

In other words we are Designing and Building from the ground up, as ifthe entire current infrastructurewere non-existant and we were starting from scratchtoday with existing infrastructure being updated or replaced accordingly.

How would your companydesign all or a portion of MFI’s “Intelligent Utility Grid”? Your answer should assume that you are designing a solution without any resource limitation or cost constraint and with MFIsubsidizing the monthly utility bills on behalf of its customers for the next 30-years to make the project commercially viable. Your company’s responsibility is to Design/Build a “World Class” state of the art solution from the ground up, making certain that when it is turned on and after it is debugged, that it can achieve “Five Nines" (i.e. 99.999%) up-time performance reliability.

Location

This entire project described within this RFP shall take place within the Caribbean.

Quality Assurance

Entire project quality assurance is mandated and shall be specified by agreed upon contract terms.

Regulatory and Legal Requirements

All regulatory and legal requirements of the project have either been met or approved by the Sovereign Government at the local, municple and federal levels. Appropriate Permitting has been done or waitsonly final Design plans toimplement construction and operational permits and licenses.

Acronyms and Definitions

AC - Alternating Current

CHP – Combined Heat and Power

COTS – Commercial Off The Shelf

DC - Direct Current

ESN - Embedded Sensor Network

HVDC – High Voltage Direct Current

NCOTS- Not Commercial Off The Shelf

NOC - NetworkOperationsCenter

PIAD – Premise Integrated Access Device

SCADA – Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

TBD- To Be Developed

VPN – Virtual Private Network

tpmC – transactions per minute / per computer Core

Bidding

Each of the following numbered items may be independently proposed and bid for consideration by MFI. The overall requirement is that each of these works in concert with the other numbered items for the completion of the entire project.

Companies may bid as a combination of multiple technologies. For example if the computer operating systems vendor needs to partner with a networking vendor to provide all the end to end systems and node management, this should be included in the bid as a prime/sub combination, or a delineation of which prime or sub is bidding which portion of the contract.

The response format for the bidding is free form, but must address the items listed in this RFP and should be limited to 50 pages. Product documentation of elements being bid may be submitted for clarification and they will not be returned, nor will they be included or count against the 50 page maximum.

The Project Specifications

1.Power Generation Plant (bulk & distributed), 1GW +

A.100% Renewable PowerProduction Plant (solar preferred)

B.Gas-Fired CHP Plant (Combustion Turbine)

C.Combination of A. and B.

D.Complete Integration and Interoperability with numbers 2., 3. and 4. below

As detailed above, the power generation “plant[s]” portion of the project may be delivered via multiple energy production formats, but the redundancy, emergency backup and integration facets are fixed requirements. The generic term “plant” in this case will be inclusive of all necessary elements, buildings, structures, substations, etc., necessary to build out the proposed power generation requirements shown above. Nuclear power is not being considered for this particular project.

2.Transport & Distribution Grid (1,000+ Miles)

  1. HVDC- (underground)
  2. Upgrade High Voltage lines
  3. Conversion of DC< >AC
  4. Upgrade and replace current Power Distribution Infrastructure “Intelligent Utility Grid”
  5. Develop Emergency Power Back Up & Storage System
  6. Develop Wide Area Grid Sensor System - Embedded Sensor Network (ESN)
  7. Integration with number 1. above and numbers 3. and 4. below
  8. Black Start capabilities and procedures

As part of the bidding process and taken into each submittal should be the specific elements of the Transportation and Distribution Grid which you plan to submit a proposal for or that you are bidding upon.

3.Advanced Metering, (up to 1.5 Million Customers)

  1. Develop Premise Integrated Access Devices (“PIADs”) for “Intelligent Utility Grid”
  2. PIADs for Commercial and Residential Customers (“Premise Situational Awareness”)
  3. PIADS shall be integrated for both electricity and water monitoring, management and control systems at the premise in real-time.
  4. Integration of PIAD’s into numbers 1. and 2. above and number 4. below

For item 3-C, PIADs for electricity and water shall be integrated and situationally aware of both residential and commercial premise in real time.

Water monitoring shall be conducted upon water entering premise, stored on premise, consumed on premise and discharged on premise.

Potable water shall be monitored to levels that include National Primary and Secondary Drinking Water Regulations and conformity to published Public Health Goal (mg/L)2standards. PIADs shall be enabled to manage and control water flow, pressure and discharge at premise.

PIADs shall monitor load in real time to and from premise for both residential and commerial customers as net users and/or producers of electricity. PIADs shall be enabled to monitor, manage and control appliance loads on premise, report and store customer data and be situationally aware to correct, trouble shoot, notify and if necessary restore service interuption via energy storage system on or off premise in real time.

A bid including average cost per device, power requirements and application hooks to available COTS products or monitoring tools or NCOTS products or monitoring tools (TBD)is expected in addition to any other information needed to detail the response.

4.Smart Grid OS and NOC

  1. Management and Control of numbers 1., 2., and 3. Above (“Grid Situational Awareness”) including real time simulation capabilities.
  2. Fully Integrated Network Elements:
  1. Control Centers
  2. Sub Stations
  3. Conversion Stations
  4. Embedded Sensor Network –(ESN)
  5. Storage Facilities
  6. PIADs
  1. Cyber Security- Biometrics, Encryption
  2. Wired and Wireless Integration of numbers 1., 2. and 3. above with Grid OS, via dedicated C&ITN
  3. NOC

For item 4-A, Dynamic simulations are crucial to the planning and operation of the power generation system. Issues such as responsive reserve levels, use of interruptible loads for responsive reserve, load rejection simulations, system stability during transmission and generation outages, critical clearing time analyses, system voltage stability, small signal stability and tuning of power system stabilizers, etc., are examined and resolved using dynamic simulations.

Combined Cycle plant output power reduces with reduction in system frequency and increase in the ambient temperature. This may affect the amount of spinning reserve required by this MFI RFP. Since these plants are the most economical, at least among gas-fueled generating units, it is possible that during an off-peak season when the base-load units maybe off-line for maintenance, a much higher percentage of generation being supplied by these plants will be necessary. Presently, there are no adequate models of combined cycle power plants (as well as individual gas turbines) available to accurately represent their behavior in a dynamic simulation. This is an example of the types of simulation software needed for this plant.

The latest version of Power Technologies Incorporated Power System Simulator for Engineers (PTI PSS/E) software will likely be adopted by MFI as its standard and any code simulators need to be incorporated into or adaptable to the PTI PSS/E software. MFIrequires models and simulations for all generators connected to the system. MFI Staff and stakeholders will use the PTI PSS/E as its standard software tool. The PTI PSS/E is a package of programs for studies of power system transmission network and generation performance in both steady-state and dynamic conditions. PTI PSS/E handles power flow, fault analysis (balanced and unbalanced), network equivalent construction, and dynamic simulation. PTI PSS/E is not set up to solve any specific problem. Rather, it is a carefully optimized data structure associated with a comprehensive array of computational tools that are directed by the user in an interactive manner. To import models into the PTI PSS/E platform, control block diagrams are translated into FORTRAN statements and compiled during the initialization of the dynamics data.

For item 4-C, we are looking for solutions encompassing biometrics that utilize optical, vascular and other measurements beyond the standard fingerprint measurement. Fingerprint biometrics will be considered but are not a preferred solution. Encryption must be at minimum 128bit, preferably 256bit solutions that are already vetted and being used in similar businesses requiring high security solutions and particular bias will be given to those solutions that have passed the various rigors of the FIPS 140 family of compliance. Overall design should meet or exceed the requirements of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) published reliability standards.

For item 4-D, latest technology wired/wireless systems that encompass the various forms of electronic gear inclusive of routers, hardware firewalls, physical security and building systems, optical networking, network management, collaboration capabilities, voice and unified communications, application networking services, storage networking, data center and blade switches.

For item 4-E, the following are to be considered a minimum portion of the bid: system-wide data backup/restore, help desk software, trouble-ticket software, SAP (all appropriate modules), CRM, applications deployment, systems monitoring control and automation software including SCADA, full network-wide monitoring including all surveillance technologies inclusive of internal and external camera systems, etc. Computer system(s) should be based on the ability to logically virtualize the CPU capacity for the mainframes and assume supercomputer specifications for speed. The systems with the highest tpmC counts will be given preferential treatment. The ideal system (hardware) will have expansion capacity of 64 CPU core minimums pre-virtualized. The disk storage systems should be enterprise capacity write-cache backed technology with the ability to easily manage multi-terabyte per hour data transfers. Robotic tape backup systems considered will be those capable of high (20-40TB) streaming backups within reasonable (4 hour) timeframes or disk to disk snapshot backups that provide equivalent functionality.The cost is less consideration than overall capabilities and growth capacity built into the system design for future enhancements.

To the extent possible, each of the above items (1.,2.,3., and 4) must be 100% digital, fully integrated, ubiquitous, seamless and fully redundant. Geographical redundancy and failover is also desired for all critical systems. The physical structures must be 100% physically secure and hard shell compliant. A strong preference will be given to applications which can be providedusing open source components as much as possible. The computer operating systems must be of a Unix variant for the servers and have the ability to host a multiple of databases (Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase, SQL, etc.). We are looking for a best of breed solution set where each component under each area is able to fully integrate with the other areas and components as seamlessly as possible. Full diagnostic capabilities must be provided within the deliverables as to be able to fully perform any support and maintenance duties required. All network and grid embedded sensor components should be ubiquitous and seamless in operation without significant need of human intervention and must be remotely manageable entities that have standard tie-ins to best of breed monitoring and control applications.

4.1 General Information Queries

  • Describe your proposed 7x24x365 NOC schedule and how you utilize people in that schedule.
  • Describe your proposed existing staff and how that staff is expected to evolve if you are the successful provider for this MFI RFP.
  • Describe the training of your staff. In particular, are they capable of early diagnosis of problems?
  • Describe any special equipment or software required for MFI to support the proposed NOC services.
  • Describe all costs for NOC services.

4.2 Monitoring System

  • Describe your ability to monitor link utilization, both for the connections internal to the MFI RFPnetwork and from the MFI RFP network to other networks.
  • Describe your willingness to investigate non-standard variables and new monitoring techniques as the MFI RFP project evolves. Examples of such procedures might include investigation of the use of QoS variables, MPLS, multicast, or IPv6.
  • Describe your ability to communicate problems with the MFI staff and membership.
  • Describe your problem reporting procedures.
  • Describe how you address "severe outages."
  • Describe your change control procedures.
  • Describe your problem escalation procedures.
  • Describe the software used in monitoring a network such as the one proposed in the MFI RFP.

4.3 Trouble Ticket System

  • Describe your trouble ticketing system and indicate what access the users of the MFI RFP will have to that system.
  • Describe how you will interact with the trouble ticket systems for MFI’s C&ITN as well asfrom commodity Internet services providers and with MFI RFPNOC services.
  • Describe your ability to provide access to the trouble ticket system during outages.
  • Describe any software that must be purchased by MFI RFP in support of the trouble ticket system.

4.4 Reporting Procedures