Smart Energy – Page 6 – Creative Connectivity

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…

Smart Meters and IP – an Inconvenient Truth

Around a hundred years ago, George Bernard Shaw quipped that England and America were two countries divided by a common language. Today there is a similar, very evident gulf growing between them in their attitude to smart metering standards. That gulf is increasingly becoming an ideological one, with the difference focussing on whether to take IP to the meter. It’s a difference of opinion that has little to do with those involved in metering or even the grid itself, but by others who want to impose their vision and their technologies upon its future.

The whole concept of bringing Internet Protocol to battery powered devices in this new era of the Internet of Things is not confined to smart metering – it’s a question that is being wrestled with by many standards groups who are trying to balance issues of accessibility, interoperability and power consumption. In general, the closer a product is to commercial deployment, the less sway the IP proponents have. But they have the US power industry in their sights.

I don’t believe that their arguments add up. If smart metering is to work it needs to look at the whole picture and make pragmatic decisions. The UK approach seems far more sensible, which may be why it’s making far better progress. In contrast, there’s a distinct feeling of banana skin about the IP advocates and their promotion of ZigBee Smart Energy Profile 2.0. As time goes on it looks like an approach that is having to conceal more and more inconvenient truths behind a veil of smoke and mirrors.

Smart Appliances – a Dangerous Distraction for Smart Energy

Over the past six months, culminating in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month, there’s been a growing clamour about smart appliances and how they will fit into the smart energy ecosystem. It’s not just the technology advocates who have been selling the story; big players in the White Goods industry, like GE and LG have been out there promoting the story as well. They have a view of a connected appliance that is constantly talking to your electricity meter, their service and maintenance site, your power provider, and for all we know, a dishwasher in Korea that’s wasting its time on the machine equivalent of Facebook.

It’s a nice high-tech story, but does it make sense? You can see how it has evolved from the effort that is being put into smart grids. The theory is that to reduce the strain on generating capacity, it makes sense for energy hungry appliances in the home to adjust their start time, so that they run when there’s least demand for electricity. Hence by connecting appliances within the home to your smart meter, or your utility’s web site, they can be told when to turn on or off. Which, on the surface, makes a certain degree of sense.

But there’s another side to the story. The connected appliance doesn’t save energy – it just means that it uses the same amount of energy at a different time. The other approach is to make the appliance more energy efficient. When you look at the relative efficiencies of different products, the manufacturers who seem most enthusiastic about smart appliances are those who sell some of the least efficient ones. It makes one wonder whether their interest in connectivity is just a PR sticking plaster to cover up their poor performance. Instead of investing in research they see an easier win in investing in media techno-babble.

The problem with doing that is that the promotion of smart appliances ups the requirement specs for the smart meters and gateways that are at the core of home energy management. Rather than let the smart metering industry have a period of relative stability to confirm their technical specifications, complete trials and educate users, this new mania around connected appliances adds a level of unnecessary technical uncertainty. As such it is a very dangerous distraction to the core requirements of smart energy.

GE – The Appliance of Ignorance

Back in the 1980’s when they were trying to establish themselves in the British market, Zanussi ran a campaign for their products using the advertising strapline “the Appliance of Science“. I was reminded of it this week when I was reading a white paper from another appliance manufacturer – GE. Not because it had anything to do with science; in fact just the opposite – it was about the most unscientific paper I’ve ever come across.

It was written to promote GE’s view on which wireless standard should be chosen for the Home Area Network (HAN). These are designed to connect devices around the home to a smart meter or a home gateway that has access to information about your current energy tariffs. GE thinks the best choice should be ZigBee because “ZigBee is better than Wi-Fi”. One of the paper’s authors is an active editor for the ZigBee Alliance Smart Energy Profile, so that’s not surprising – he’s entitled to be enthusiastic about the technology he’s part of. And it may be that ZigBee is a good choice. But GE’s analysis doesn’t provide any evidence as to why it might be. Instead it provides an evidence-free quasi-analysis that does ZigBee more harm than good.

We’ve had a year of hype as different wireless standards vie for the crown of being chosen as the de facto one for smart metering. Much of that obscured the facts which need to be considered to make that choice. In the last few months I thought the industry had settled down and was beginning to a bit more logical. This rant from GE suggests that some of those involved in the debate still have a lot to learn. If you want to see how not to make a reasoned argument, download and read the GE white paper. I’ll highlight what is so wrong about it.

The Evolution of Interoperability. Making the Dream a Reality.

I’ve been attending a lot of Smart Energy meetings recently and listening to industry experts talking about the need for interoperability in the connections between smart meters and appliances around the home. I’ve also been hearing a number of standards organisations trying to promote the message that the concepts of interoperability and a standard are synonymous. That’s a very dangerous message, because the two are only very loosely related. Just because you have a standard, it does not mean that products which use it are, or will become interoperable.

To understand why equating a standard with interoperability is a fallacy, let’s start with an analogy. In many ways, a standard is like a language. So we could define English, or French or Russian as standards. The standards bodies would then claim that everyone who speaks the same language is interoperable. I’d disagree. The language defines the grammar and the vocabulary, but you only have to listen to a Democrat and Republican senator debating health reforms to understand that speaking the same language does nothing to promote interoperability. If anything, a standard provides the tools to ensure that conflict is more, rather than less likely to occur.

Interoperability is about working together seamlessly. To achieve that requires more than just a standard. It needs a set of interoperability tests and the testing tools to confirm compliance with those tests. These don’t generally come with a standard – they need to be put in place to support it. That entails time and money, which means most standards can’t support them until they’re already fairly well established. Industries like Smart Energy demand interoperability, as they want the meters they install today to work with devices that customers may install in ten or twenty years’ time. But if they want to achieve it, they, need to understand how this process works.

Patent Trolls anticipate Smart Metering Bonanza

Over the last year, different groups have been beavering away to decide on a wireless standard for smart meters. It’s been interesting to observe the ways that different countries have approached this. There’s been the pragmatic approach of going with what’s available today, but with the understanding that it might need to be changed, so that everything currently being installed is at risk of needing replacement. That’s the UK approach of DECC. Then there’s the academic approach which is favoured by SGIP in the US, which entails producing a giant matrix of the vital (and not so vital) statistics of every possible wireless standard. At which point there will presumably be a flash of smoke, a glamorous assistant and a magician will be brought on stage to perform the conjuring trick of comparing apples, lobsters and elephants and deciding which is most appropriate of them for the smart energy feast. Or we have the slightly nepotistic ETSI approach over in Europe, which seems to be one of giving EU funding to all of their consultant or professor friends, who in return for this largesse promise to write their own, brand new wireless specification in time for the party.

Whilst some of these approaches consider cost in terms of the price of silicon, or even the opportunity cost in terms of time to market, one significant cost has been missing from their calculations – the cost of choosing a standard that opens up Intellectual Property disputes. That’s a real risk. The only place I’ve seen it publicly stated is in a briefing document from the Bluetooth SIG, which points out that from the IP viewpoint, wireless standards are far from equal. It’s a very valid concern. We’re already seeing the patent trolls coming out and attacking ZigBee and Wi-Fi. As volumes start to increase, so will their determination to make a fast buck. As soon as that happens, deployment could grind to a halt.