Smart Energy – Page 8 – Creative Connectivity

Switching and the Smart Energy Market

Back in 1776 Adam Smith made the observation that England is a Nation of Shopkeepers (although Napoleon usually gets the credit for the phrase). If either were alive today they’d probably reconsider and point out that we’re now a nation of Switchers. Nowhere is that more true than our attitude towards energy suppliers. According to OFGEM, over 76% of us have switched our energy supplier in the last ten years. Around 26% of us do it every year.

For some reason, we love switching. Our favourite TV adverts are for comparison sites. One – the advert for Compare the Market uses a family of animated meerkats which have become so popular they’ve spawned a range of merchandise. Whether it’s insurance, energy, mobile phone plans, broadband or saving plans, we’re addicted. And nowhere more so than with switching energy provider.

It’s not just the websites urging us to do that. Government ministers keep on telling us that to get the best energy price we should switch suppliers. Their message is not to use less energy – just change supplier. And part of their plan for smart metering is to make it even easier to switch – as often as once a day. It’s creating a very interesting dynamic for the industry, but one that is about to change.

A UK Roadmap for Smart Metering HANs

One of the eternal complaints about short range wireless is its limited range, particularly when used within homes. Whilst the name “short range wireless” ought to give a clue about the existence of the problem, it doesn’t stop a general level of indignation when a radio signal doesn’t make it through the walls of your house.

Up until now this was mostly an annoyance, largely because it was a personal problem. By that I mean it was an inconvenient truth that individuals discovered when they bought a consumer wireless product, whether that was a Wi-Fi access point, a cordless phone or a mobile headset. As these were generally low cost, discretionary purchases, users either took them back, put them in a cupboard and forgot about them, or worked around the problem by moving the appropriate access point. For the more technically engaged, a raft of companies grew up making repeaters, range extenders, power amplifiers and directional antennae, allowing users to exacerbate the problem by swamping all of their neighbours’ installations.

In the last year people have started to take the middle word of “short range wireless” rather more seriously. That’s come about as governments around the world have mandated deployments of smart meters. Whilst no-one cared too much if a consumer product didn’t work, smart meters are a different kettle of fish. They need to be able to connect with the other components of the smart metering wireless network in the home in order to send consumption data back to the utilities. They have to do that reliably and regularly over a period of many years. And they need to be able to cope with a wide variety of homes – from small bungalows to multi-storey apartment buildings. All of a sudden that “range” word is getting a lot of attention.

The problem is that the wireless standards being considered don’t cover 100% of different homes. Any one standard probably struggles with covering much more than 75% of potential homes. That’s a big problem for regulators and civil servants who have a very black and white view of life – when a mandate says “all”, they assume that means every last home. So what can they do?

The new dumb smart meter model from PG&E

Just as the battle was starting up again for wireless dominance within the smart meter industry, Californian utility Pacific Gas & Energy (PG&E) may have come up with the ultimate answer – don’t turn on the radio in the meter. It’s one of those cunning plans which will have the various standards body queuing up to make sure they’re responsible for the chip which is never connected.

This bizarre situation arises from the decision back in March this year, when PG&E worked out what to do with their electro-sensitive customers who were demanding that they weren’t radiated with emissions emanating from their smart meters. PG&E put forward a proposal to make customers pay for non-smart meters, charging somewhere between $135 and $270 a year for the privilege of having a good old-fashioned meter reader come round and leave them a note to say they were out when he called. The double whammy benefit that none of the media appeared to pick up is that the $270 charge would eat into these user’s mobile phone bill, so they’d have less money to spend on getting radiated by phoning their local papers to campaign against smart meters. More affluent customers could have the gold plated option of paying several thousand dollars to have their meters moved to the top of local telegraph poles, or buried underground.

PG&E reckoned that this option would be taken up by 185,400 customers. (I don’t know how they got to that precise figure. Although by a strange coincidence, 1854 is the year that Texas was connected by telegraph to the rest of the US, putting in place the telecoms network that Enron would use so effectively 150 years later.) Anyway, this number presented PG&E with a problem. 185,400 is not a lot in terms of commissioning a special non-wireless meter. So they were faced with the prospect of having to pay more for a non-smart meter, wiping out a substantial part of that $50 million annual windfall from their more sensitive customers. Today they announced a solution – they’d supply the same wireless smart meter, but turn the radio off. Enter the wirelessless meter.

Smart Home Standards go wild at Amsterdam

The Smart Metering and Smart Homes exhibition in Amsterdam is Europe’s largest show for this industry, so it’s a good reflection of where things are at. Given the amount of noise that’s been generated around ZigBee and its Smart Energy Profile, I’d expected to see most of the other wireless contenders to be absent or skulking in their cages. However, someone walking around without those preconceptions might have gone home with a rather different view of the state of play.

There’s no doubt that ZigBee is well placed in current smart meter deployments. Although there are quite a limited number of real ZigBee deployments in Europe, the UK has more or less committed to SEP 1.2 for its foundation phase of national deployment and most meter and IHD suppliers were showing ZigBee products, albeit with not very many sporting a ZigBee certified logo.

Despite that, a significant number of suppliers were also highlighting support for the new Wireless M-Bus standard, which has slithered down the spectrum to its new resting point of 169 MHz. Wireless M-Bus has always had a popular following within Germany, with an implementation based on a radio running at 868 MHz. The shift to the lower frequency acknowledges one of the enduring complaints which the 868MHz camp has levelled at 2.4GHz solutions, which is their potentially limited range.

Whilst 2.4GHz is a frequency that’s fine for most houses, it faces challenges with blocks of flats. Up until now, the 868 MHz triumvirate of Wireless M-Bus, Z-Wave and wireless KNX had always given the impression that they could achieve adequate range at 868 MHz. This break in the 868 MHz ranks does not augur well for a reasoned debate, but just increases the in-fighting and paranoia about whether any radio standard works or is ready for deployment. That’s not what Smart Metering needs.

Energy Addiction – Changing Consumer Behaviour

Every so often you hear something that seems fairly trivial at the time, but then, as you think about it, you realise that it contains a fundamental truth. That happened to me a few weeks ago when I was speaking at the Smart Metering UK conference in London.

One of the speakers before me was Aidan O’Neill of PrePayPower in Ireland. Aidan made a statement that the bulk of his customers spend more each day on cigarettes than they do on electricity. It’s one of those throw-away lines that doesn’t really impinge at the time. Let me explain why it’s so important.

Smart Energy Profile 2.0 – a case of too much PAP?

Just when you though Smart Energy was settling down, and it was going to be smart meters all round, the smart grid movement is getting its knickers in a twist. It’s not a problem about what needs to be done, but about the standards, what goes into the standards and who is responsible for them? In the past few weeks both NIST and the ZigBee Alliance have had some major tantrums, which raises questions about the speed and degree of technology push that is being forced on the industry.

There is no lack of agreement about the need to improve the grid and the way that we consume energy. Growing demand, political concern over the stability of supplies, climate change worries, new challenges in the form of electric vehicles and decades of underinvestment in generating capacity and the grid have persuaded Governments around the world to support and mandate investment in new “smart” technology from smart meters in homes to intelligence in the grid. The last time the world saw a similar level of stimulus was in the 1930s, during the great depression. So this really is likely to be a once in a lifetime event. The political will is there, the question is who decides how it is going to be done? Groups like NIST in the US are pushing hard to put things in place, but are groups like this too academic in their approach? Over the last year they’ve set up eighteen Priority Action Plans or PAPs to oversee development. (A potentially unfortunate acronym as my dictionary defines pap as “worthless or oversimplified ideas”). And according to a recent pronouncement they obviously don’t think the industry is doing enough to meet the challenge. But before we look at that, let me share a quote with you:

“I hate those guys. I hate those legislators and politicians – not because they restrict business and screw up the markets, even though they do and it does. I hate governments because I know those guys. I went to school with them. And let me tell you, the weakest, most ignorant, most drunken incompetents work for the US government. And the bottom of the barrel, know-nothing dicks design the regulations for a market they know nothing about. Why should we look at the regulations they’ve put in place by committee and go “Yeah, you suck at your jobs, fine, we’ll ignore that and suck at ours too?”

Not my words, but those of Lucy Prebble from her brilliant play “Enron“. It’s a diatribe that she gives to Jeffrey Skilling – Enron’s President, as his empire starts to crumble. Strangely, from a character that has little to commend himself throughout the rest of the play, it’s a dramatic moment where you suddenly start to feel sympathy with him, particularly if you’ve ever worked in a regulated industry. Of course, that speech is just fiction and has nothing to do with the current situation…