smart meter – Page 7 – Creative Connectivity

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…

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.

Let the Wireless Wars Begin

It’s been an interesting week for the short range wireless standards. The two terrible teenagers, ANT and ZigBee have both shown signs of their growing maturity, starting to position themselves as far more serious contenders in the market place. In the wake of their move from adolescence, a new toddler has emerged in the form of Toumaz, with their announcement of their Telran chip.

What has been missing is any reaction, or in fact much sign of any action from their elder siblings – Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. As large manufacturers continue to tighten their belts, one of the less noticed effects has been a steady withdrawal of engineering support from standards organisations. In the past, many of these have been staffed with seconded experts from the big names in industry. Increasingly those big names are withdrawing, relying largely on chip vendors to push their interests within the standards organisations. That’s left Wi-Fi and Bluetooth battling to persuade industry members that either standard has a development future, with certain of their members considering that the job has been done.

Which opens up the field for the former competitors to claim some potentially interesting parts of the market.

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.