Smart meters as home gateway? Or another option?
President Barack Obama - make that the president's people - wants to ensure that the consumer interface with the smart grid enables optimized energy use, which should be practical, encourage widespread adoption and promote innovation.
The president's people are concerned, however, that competing standards will impede or undermine progress in this endeavor.
Thus the impetus for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to launch a public forum two weeks ago on questions related to the architecture by which consumers would interface with a smart grid. Comments were taken from Feb. 23 until March 1.
About three dozen responses were received, many of them running to thousands of words. Rather than attempt a proportional abstract, I'll just cherry pick some of the remarks that can be easily summarized. And link you to the forum here. First, however, I'll note the themes discerned by the president's people at OSTP.
According to a summary by Kevin Hurst, assistant director for energy technology at the OSTP, respondents emphasized maintaining flexibility in the standards process to enable alternative architectures for smart home networks. Near-term, no single, optimum design will emerge. The desirability of particular implementations will vary over time and according to individual utility and consumer interests. The standards framework should support a variety of data pathways, applications, and transport mechanisms.
Respondents see options which include using the meter as the primary gateway for energy management and provisioning, or the use of energy monitoring and control services through media not directly connected to the meter. Utilities and communities will have various preferences based on cost, functionality, reliability and ease-of-use. The government, it was suggested, should assess the privacy and security implications of various implementations.
Now to the remarks themselves, many of which come from vendors.
Chris King, chief regulatory officer for eMeter, said that standards history suggested three winning qualities: open and non-proprietary, painfully simple and driven by the market, not by government or utility fiat. "The meter should be one gateway, but government should not specify it as the primary gateway," King wrote. "The market will quickly reveal its preference." Possible gateways, according to King, include meters, pole-top communications concentrators, in-home energy services interface, personal computer, set-top box or in-home Internet router.
Most utilities expect a 15-year life for smart meters, yet many consumer electronics products only deliver one to three years' service, wrote Michael Stuber, an engineering manager with Itron. Building a meter today with the consumer electronics capabilities of tomorrow is uneconomical and likely impossible. Assuming a broadband connection to every home in a utility's service area isn't realistic, today. While the meter as gateway in the long term isn't ideal, it can jump-start the market - providing price and usage data - and it provides egalitarian access to every home. As deeper consumer communications come online, they can ride on the smart meter.
Matt Maupin, senior technical marketer at Freescale Semiconductor, tried to bridge the gap between these two views. Early on the meter as gateway provides a control point for utilities and price and consumption data can be pulled directly from it. If that data must travel through a separate energy service interface (ESI), then it travels through the Internet and a service provider and arrives as interval data. As home area networks (HAN) and neighborhood area networks (NAN) are built out it makes sense to have both for enhanced consumer services.
Gene Wang, CEO of People Power Co., suggested that smart meters will serve as one gateway among several. Smart meters may report interval data a day after the fact, but "consumers want instant feedback and easy-to-use, cool new gadgets that save money right away," Wang wrote. After all, even if 53 million households in the United States are smart metered by 2015, 80 million will not be so equipped.
"Has work actually determined 'what consumers want?'" challenged Michael Harding, a user experience proponent. "I can think of many situations where I'd want to see energy system performance, all requiring different data display solutions and reporting options."
Perhaps needless to say, many posters provided long, detailed comments to the OSTP/NIST forum and, with only three dozen, it might behoove our readers to check in and read for themselves. I'll take a look at the second question soon - it focuses on data ownership and access - and excerpt some remarks from that forum, which ended Monday.
Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757
Comments
DOES THE CONSUMER GET A VOTE?
The question of consumer-friendly standards is an interesting one, particularly when consumers are, by default, locked out of the equation. This begs the underlying question: Who is the intended beneficiary of the technology?
Marketing (propaganda?) efforts universally seek consumer buy-in (literal and psychological) but one can't help notice that the "sellers" are far more enthusiastic than the "buyers". Is this a problem of consumer ignorance....or evidence of functioning survival instincts on the consumer side of the meter? Personally, I'm left cold by the "central planning" approach. If the question of standardization is about datacom, freqs, EMI, FCC requirements, security and so forth, are vendors not sufficiently guided already? If the question is instead about "features", shouldn't consumer participation be more actively sought and shouldn't vendors be allowed to explore at their own risk?
It would be interesting to see how SM "boxes" would fare if offered directly to the general public through big box retailers. Would the SM concept fall flat? Would it succeed at some price point? What sort of informational disclosures would be necessary? What "killer apps" would create demand?
Interesting times.
wgellis@energyd - good points...
This is what bothers me: "Respondents see options which include using the meter as the primary gateway for energy management and provisioning, or the use of energy monitoring and control services"
what do these key words mean?
Maybe this is why consumers are either apathetic or hostile... I certainly don't want central planning telling me what temp to set my thermostat...
Consumer choice
I think this is a great idea - to let big box retailers, hardware stores or electricians sell smart meters (or smart thermostats, as Iowa municipal utilities are using) alongside CFLs, insulation, windows, HVAC systems, occupancy sensors, etc.
A command-and-control mind-set is probably why the Department of Energy has assumed that regulated utilities should own all smart meters rather than let market forces (price signals) determine the most cost effective set of technologies for efficiency and demand response . There also may be some perceived need for utilities to hire meter installers to compensate for fewer power plant construction jobs. Also it's hard to see how TOU pricing can work without utility-owned smart meters. Then there's the safety issue; I for one don't want to install my own smart meter. But these obstacles all can be overcome by free market forces.
If a government agency (or Underwriters Labs) certified a limited set of standards for metering (kWh measurement, nothing more) consumer markets could dictate all the other features, devices and business models. Look how gasoline is metered at gas stations. Meter makers should have to comply only with limited standards, and allow audits. A better model would still involve government and utilities, but with a lighter touch, leaving room for innovation and more variety of consumer-owned (or third party owned & managed) automation and control devices.
Well said
You hit the nail on the head today. It's pretty hard to get a sense of "what the consumer wants" when the consumer is relatively unaware of the oncoming technology and rationale, as we discussed yesterday.
Tomorrow, look for a column on the situation in Texas, with "meter backlash" continuing.
And thanks for your contributions, Phil Carson