Smart meters as home gateway? Or another option?

PhilCarson.jpg [2]

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 [3]. 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 [4]
303-228-4757