The more things change...
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Almost exactly ten years ago, I was attending a conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center on the wireless Internet -- a fledgling idea with a business case that had yet to gel. Well, we all know how that turned out. Today the wireless Internet has become an integral part of our landscape, providing information on the go that serves the enterprise and the individual alike. The success of Apple Inc.’s iPhone has driven AT&T Wireless’ top line, as well as overloading the carrier’s data networks, and spawned imitators and entire new classes of wireless devices.
Flash forward: Today, I’m writing from the Santa Clara Convention Center again, this time on the smart grid, a fledgling idea with a business case that is just beginning to gel.
The business case for the smart grid, at this point, is actually more developed than the wireless Internet was in 2000.
And here’s an interesting tie-in: yesterday I attended a session on how telecommunications providers might serve electric utilities as the latter work out the various business cases for how an end-to-end, two-way communications overlay on their operations might serve them.
In this scenario, the electric utilities are actively honing their sense of how to leverage two-way communications linking their generation, transmission and distribution assets to achieve operational efficiencies, while enabling electricity consumers to do something similar.
The question addressed this afternoon was how telecommunications providers could serve this new market. They’ve got ideas, but it’s still early in the game.
Gary Kessler, director for operational technology for PNM Resources, said that subsidiary Texas New Mexico Power (TNMP) went with a public cellular network for two-way communications with its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). An 18-month trial is about to wrap up and the utility expects the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) to approve the first public wireless AMI deployment by an investor-owned utility (IOU) in the country.
The first step, already trialed with a few tens of thousands of smart meters, is automated meter reading and service provision, but because the meters are upgradeable by vendor SmartSynch, as carrier AT&T upgrades its slower GPRS network to long-term evolution (LTE), a so-called fourth-generation technology, so the utility will upgrade the meters to serve more advanced functions in new business cases.
Why go with AT&T and a public cellular network?
“We’re the smallest IOU in Texas,” Kessler told his audience. “We’re capital constrained and we wanted to avoid the cost of building an expensive private network. Plus, the TNMP service area is hardly contiguous; it’s scattered all over the state of Texas. After going out to a lot of vendors with a request for proposal, we received only two. The AT&T offer was plug and play, literally. We plugged in the meters and 30 minutes later we were collecting data, at or below the cost of sending readers physically into the field.”
One upside: no network design with a “chokepoint” that can be hacked or destroyed by vandals.
What about data overload on AT&T’s network? Asked one participant.
“Ah, the ‘iPhone problem,’” Kessler said. “We read our meters at 2 a.m. The data load is actually pretty small.”
“The elephant in the room,” Kessler added, “is the ZigBee standard on meters, which can be hacked to access appliances linked to a home area network (HAN) -- that opens it up to scary things. ZigBee has security flaws it’ll need to address in 2.0.”
Well, that’s one small step for TNMP. But clearly AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Qwest Communications, which sat on yesterday’s panel, have giant leaps in mind. AT&T’s Kevin Jones, industry solutions practice manager for utilities at the carrier, rattled off areas within utilities’ front office, power generation and transmission and distribution operations, as well as in residential, commercial and industrial properties where telecom providers would like to be involved.
This wall-to-wall approach seemed to reflect that the carriers have yet to really focus on their best role in the smart grid.
“I talk to carriers pretty often and, of course, smart grids come up as one of their key vertical targets,” enterprise analyst Kitty Weldon at Current Analysis told me on Monday. “But as so many of them use application partners such as Ambient or Itron, it’s hard to know how much specialization is coming from the carriers beyond network transport. In Europe, carriers are pretty excited about smart grids because mandatory regulations ensuring that smart metering is accomplished by all utilities by a particular date. In the U.S., I’m not sure how much traction the carriers are getting, given how conservative utilities are here and the fact that they’ve been running their own networks or using carriers using non-cellular technologies for a long time.”
Another fledgling initiative being driven by baby-step business cases, crowded by eager participants, in the short term. Long term, it sure feels a lot like an inevitable transformation whose shape is hard to predict. The dicey part lies between those two places.
Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757
