Jeff St. John 11 17 09, 10:00 AM

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Itron Enlists Sequentric as Newest Partner

Itron has picked a new partner to link its older, one-way communicating electricity meters to utilities – North Carolina-based home energy networking startup Sequentric Energy Systems.

The idea is to capture data that's sent out by those "drive-by" meters – so called because their encoder receiver transmitter (ERT) radios send out signals meant to be captured by utility workers driving by with digital readers – and carry it back to the utility via another communications channel.

At the same time, Sequentric will display the energy usage information, which comes about once every 15 seconds or so, to the homeowner via an interface, which could be a stand-alone panel or a Web or mobile device display, CEO Daniel Flohr said.

There are about 67 million Itron ERT meters in the field today, making them an attractive target for utilities that can't justify replacing them, but still want to make them more capable of two-way communication.

Sequentric joins a long list of partners involved with Itron on that effort, including Tendril Networks, OpenPeak, EnergyHub and Ambient (see Green Light post).

But Flohr thinks that his company's starting price of $59 for a home energy management hub that links to Itron's ERT meters might well beat the prices from the competition. Adding a smart thermostat and a few other sensors attached to appliances or home circuits could be done for less than $150, he said.

Keeping prices low will likely be critical to capturing the home energy management market. Studies indicate that most homeowners don't want to spend much more than $50 to $100 on such a system, and utilities will be pressed to justify to regulators the costs of delivering systems across their entire service territories (see Utilities Mull Price Points, Policies for Home Energy Management).

At the same time, Google and Microsoft have come out with home energy platforms that are free for consumers to use, although they would need smart meters or in-home energy measuring devices to get more detailed real-time energy usage information (see Green light posts here and here).

Unlike some companies making home energy management systems, Sequentric doesn't see itself selling directly to customers, Flohr said.

"We're not suggesting this is something the homeowner goes out and buys," he said. "Our customer is, and likely always will be, the utility company. That's to us how the smart grid gets deployed."

That is, he sees these gateways as a way for utilities to control demand response – turning down air conditioners, clothes dryers, pool pumps and other power-hungry appliances.

To link its devices and gateway, Sequentric uses a proprietary wireless network in the 433-megahertz spectrum. That could make it a hard sell to utilities that are expected to deploy smart grid systems that use standards now being developed by the federal government (see Smart Grid Standards Roadmap Unveiled).

But Flohr said that Sequentric's gateway could come with a bridge device to allow it to communicate via ZigBee, the protocol that's emerging as a leader in North American smart meter deployments, or other standards-based wireless technologies such as WiFi (see RF Mesh, ZigBee Top North American Utilities' Smart Meter Wish Lists).

Sequentric is piloting its system with a number of utilities, Flohr said. Sources have told Greentech Media that one of those partners is Duke Energy, though neither Duke nor Flohr have confirmed that fact (see Sequentric Working on Duke Pilot Project).