The Smart Home, Part I

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.

Very nice summary—great work!

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.

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

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

i think they recently got funded…?