A little snow, and a lot of learning, at TechAdvantage

It’s been a long time since I last visited Georgia. Almost 40 years, if I were to tally the count. In that time, I’ve forgotten a lot of what I learned about the Deep South while living there, but there’s one thing I do recall: I don’t think it’s supposed to snow there in February.

But snow it did, just over a week ago, the day after I landed in Atlanta for the TechAdvantage 2010 Conference and Expo. And before the first flakes began to fall, rumors were surfacing in conversations outside the conference rooms of flights already being cancelled. Coming as it did just on the heels of the back-to-back storms that grounded flights in and out of Washington, D.C., for days on end only a week earlier, it was almost funny (but only almost). So, too, were the inevitable climate change jokes the February snowstorm brought with it to Georgia.

While the snow fell outside, and many of us took a few minutes to aim our iPhones and BlackBerries out the floor-to-ceiling windows in order to document the oddity, serious work was also going on inside the walls of the Georgia World Congress Center, where the TechAdvantage conference and the annual meeting of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association were co-located.

With up to eight sessions available at any one time, it was difficult to choose, so I focused my efforts primarily on those sessions in the Engineering and Operations Track (Information Technology and Supply Chain Management were also covered in separate tracks). And, as it turned out, my TechAdvantage experience ended up focusing on meter data management (MDM) and customer interface beyond the meter, two topics that we have discussed with increasing frequency in Intelligent Utility magazine.

In a session entitled “Meter Data Management: What’s the Big Picture for Co-ops?”, Mark Day, vice president of Utility Integrated Solutions, Inc., focused on an overview of MDM, what they can do, and what co-ops can expect out of it. “Key today,” he said, “is that when these meters provide all this information, it actually makes sense that you ought to be able to do something with it.”

“A lot of people in your utility could utilize the data in a lot of different ways,” he told a crowded room, and then went on to explain the different processes to which MDMs can bring a wealth of information.

Over lunch, I met Tariq Samad, a corporate fellow with Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions. Afterwards, he took the lead in a presentation covering “Customer Interface Beyond the Meter.” Samad, who is also a member of the governing board for the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, shared his ideas about the homes and buildings side of automation control. “Building automation controls 66 percent of energy use in homes and buildings today,” he told us. “The smart grid will enable more.”

The realization of smart grid benefits, Samad said, will need variable pricing, deployment of controls “beyond the meter,” and standard architecture and communications controls. There is low-hanging fruit here, to be found in leveraging automated meter reading deployments by using controls to achieve demand response and energy efficiency under variable pricing.

Samad went into far more detail than I am able to address in this column, but my next piece will take these thoughts further.

The final session I attended was a peer discussion forum, where utilities were offered the opportunity, with vendors absent, to discuss how to make the most of their advanced metering infrastructure data, and any issues they’d come across, or questions they wanted to ask of each other. Discussion started off slowly, but ramped up pretty quickly, covering in-home displays versus the Internet; using MDM for engineering reasons as well as billing, demand response, and more; and even touched upon the paradigms for prepay versus regular billing.

The next morning, at 4 a.m., I headed for the airport, in hopes my flight was still flying. As I buckled up for what was sure to be a slide of a ride, the taxi driver laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I used to drive in New York City.”

I encourage your comments, and would like to hear your thoughts on this. Please use the comment button here, e-mail me at krowland@energycentral.com, or telephone me directly at 720-331-3555.