Tuesday, March 10, 2009 Latest Update: 3:53AM

Greentech Grid

Print
Email
- Recipient's Email Your Email Send me a copy
- Thank you!
  Your article has been sent.
- Error
  There was a problem sending your article.
Share
- Digg
- Delicious
- Stumble
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Reddit
- Mixx
- LinkedIn

Grid

(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) March 10, 2009 10 Comments

The Smart Home, Part I

Smart grid proponents like to talk about the "Home Area Network" – a communications network for thermostats, appliances and electronics that can display the energy they're using. But getting there will take a lot of time and money.

Back in 2006, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory set up 200 Washington state homeowners with appliances and displays that tracked and transmitted their energy use – a test run of the potential for the much-vaunted "smart grid" to reach into people's homes.

The idea behind the GridWise project was to enable utilities and homeowners to become informed partners in saving energy. And it worked. Consumers trimmed their power costs by around 10 percent on average.

Fast-forward three years, and you'll find that one half of the promised smart grid is on its way to becoming a reality. Utilities are now tracking power use from their control stations to the smart meters – built by well-established companies like Itron, Landis+Gyr, Sensus, Elster and General Electric – that have been installed at about millions of homes and businesses across the country (see The Year in Smart Grid).

But the so-called "Home Area Network" that will bridge the gap from those smart meters into the home itself remains for the most part the realm of pilot projects.

"We're just at the point where we're laying the network down," said John Quealy, managing director of equity research at Canaccord Adams. "Once you see these meters in, you're going to see another wave in the next year or two in network device-related applications."

Nonetheless, the ecosystem is rapidly evolving. The following is a guide to finding your way around the home.

What Will Get Wired?

To control a household appliance, you've got to first connect it to the network. Although some new appliances come with networking capabilities, most don't, so for the next several years, one of the big tasks will revolve around attaching networking nodules and intelligence to the appliances in your home.

The first target for these efforts invariably is the heating and air conditioning system. HVAC consumes 16 percent of all of the energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Thus, expect to see smart thermostats get installed in conjunction with smart meters.

It will then cascade to other appliances. Dryers, for example, use about 5,000 watts of power on average. Several utilities speak about setting up protocols to dryers to prevent them from running, or at least from generating heat, before 6 p.m. Lighting (if dimmable) pool heaters, pool pumps, washers and other appliances will be controlled as well. Even spare freezers, notorious power suckers, can be cycled off and on without risk of thawing, according to Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril, which makes home power monitoring and display equipment.

As for how you'll control it, options include Web portals, stand-alone displays or controls embedded in devices like thermostats. On the cutting edge might be controls for cell phones and other mobile devices – Tendril launched such an application recently, and other makers of energy monitoring for the home are planning similar offerings.

What's the Cost?

A smart meter now costs about $100 and the utility picks up the tab. Smart thermostats might cost $150 and up, and a nodule for an individual appliance will cost $10 or less. While utilities will install the meters and even some thermostats, expect them to do less as time goes on and expect consumers to plug in stuff.

Utility Control or Individual Control?

Nearly every company says that individuals want control over their appliances and that they are ready to give it to them. But it's a qualified control. Utilities will provide default settings based around pricing. "Do you want the utility to take corrective action if power prices exceed 15 cents a kilowatt hour?" "Do you want to be on the SuperSaver plan?" Questions like these will be put on an interface and users will then select their plan; then the utility with ratchet down lights and HVAC when appropriate. Consumers will be able to opt out, of course, after getting the warnings about how this could blow their cost savings. Think of it like a restaurant. You pick your food but someone else controls how it's cooked.

Or maybe not. Some companies are looking to the possibility of jumping ahead of utility smart meter rollouts to bring homeowners home energy monitoring gear that could then be linked up to utilities via existing broadband connections (see A Broadband Smart Grid?). But observers note that these kinds of solutions will appeal to a limited class of early adopters willing to shell out hundreds of dollars to get a better grip on their energy usage.

Page
1
2
Next ›

Comments [10]

Robert Gohn 03/10/09 5:02 AM
Nice summary, but the state of “flux” in the standards is way overstated. ZigBee is the established standard set for wireless HAN. This goes well beyond just getting bits from point to point, but also includes the application layer commands and the entire security and authentication regime. HomePlug’s place for a PLC home solution is being cemented by it’s cooperation with the ZigBee Alliance (after being cajoled by the utilities) to adopt ZigBee’s Smart Energy upper layer work. The other “competing” technologies are nowhere near as complete.
Reply

Steve Pluvia 03/10/09 5:44 AM
Very nice summary—great work!
Reply

Peter Tarca 03/10/09 9:14 AM
Great overview. The one company that wasn?t mentioned in your post is Proliphix, Inc. We have built an energy management infrastructure based on IP that supports our intelligent single-piece Network Thermostats(NT). While our business is targeted at small commercial, municipal and institutional facilities, many of our 10?s of thousands of customers are homeowners who simply plug into their existing home broadband networks for remote energy management and control. We see our service allowing homeowners and businesses to use their existing broadband connections to link them to utilities in advance of smart meter rollouts. Today we have single entity enterprise deployments with visibility/control of 1000?s of kilowatts that the utilities could have DR control over.
Reply

David Egan 03/12/09 7:46 AM
The comments about MBus in Europe are a little overstated I think, probably unintentionally. There are deployments using MBus and Wireless MBus in central Europe, especially Germany, Netherlands and Austria, but there are multiple incompatible MBus standards (some unidirectional, some bidirectional) involved here rather than a single homogeneous standard, and by all accounts all is not working as well as it might seem. ZigBee is making good headway in Europe, though it is more used in the “last mile” backhaul networks at the moment, mainly for gas meters, and not yet as much in the HAN as it is seen in the US (except for some pilots in the UK). A significant deployment of ZigBee meters (270,000) can be seen in Gothenburg, Sweden, and soon in several locations in Spain, with France and Italy looking at ZigBee for backhaul for gas meters also. ZigBee is possibly the only standard that could be used in both the HAN and last mile backhaul, and possibly lead to the need for only one RF communications chip in a smart meter. ZigBee has got the security, bandwidth and mesh networking capability to do both.
DaveE
Reply

jim stack 03/14/09 6:16 AM
Good article. The smart meter and V2G Vehicle To Grid can all work together. Your car can change at nigfht off peak and sell on peak. Your air cond can flip off for 5 minuets now and then along with hundgreds of others to prevent a brown out or even black out as has happened in the past. For this you will also save money and the grid.
I’m all for a smater grid and smart appliances that are super efficent.
Reply

Bob Dumont 03/23/09 10:54 AM
I have been using a so-called Smart Meter since October 2005. At the time my electric provider was testing peak/off-peak pricing so I took them up on the offer. They started a five-year process to convert all their customers by 2012 to the new meter. I have been able to keep 80% of my usage off-peak since inception. However I would benefit even more if I could both automate functions or see what is drawing power at various times of the day.

There are very few appliances on the market right now that support power management. It would be beneficial if vendors would join together and commit to a standard for new appliances. Government should also work towards pushing utilities towards AMI.
Reply

Bob Dumont 03/23/09 11:30 AM
I have been using a so-called Smart Meter since October 2005. At the time my electric provider was testing peak/off-peak pricing so I took them up on the offer. They started a five-year process to convert all their customers by 2012 to the new meter. I have been able to keep 80% of my usage off-peak since inception. However I would benefit even more if I could both automate functions or see what is drawing power at various times of the day.

There are very few appliances on the market right now that support power management. It would be beneficial if vendors would join together and commit to a standard for new appliances. Government should also work towards pushing utilities towards AMI.
Reply

mark buccini 04/6/09 1:56 PM
This is an excellent article summarizing the key smart meter functions, players and enabling technologies. Nice mention that simply making the consumer energy-aware, a.k.a. in-home display has proven to save on the order of 10% of a house holds energy. Without a visible speedometer how can you tell how fast you are going. Also refreshing to see more visibility being cast on the concern of putting all of the technology smarts under glass and expecting it to survive in a real environmental stresses and keep up with the technology advances for better than decade. Top it off by adding yet another network, a low-power 2.4GHz radio at that under this same glass. It is an easy argument to make that the meter should remain a rock-solid counter ?. a connected counter OK ? but just a node ? put home intelligence in the home.
Reply