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Verizon Wireless at CES: We’re not just a phone company

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:37:00 +0000

When you think of Verizon Wireless as a company, do you think of products such as smart meters, car diagnostics modules or connected recycle bins? Probably not and it’s easy to understand why: The consumer face of Verizon Wireless is that of a cellular phone company that now covers 273 million consumers with fast LTE service on smartphones and tablets. But you’d never know that from the company’s booth at CES.

This year’s booth is very different

I toured the booth today and while I didn’t measure it exactly, I’d estimate that 97 percent of the floor space wasn’t used to show off phones or tablets. Instead, Verizon is highlighting its Innovations Center, which it opened up in 2011, Since then, Verizon worked to get the building blocks in place so it could help partners with connected device ideas. And that’s what CES 2013 is all about for the company.

So what kind of partners and products — Verizon prefers to call them “solutions” — are in the spotlight? Through a partnership with Delphi, I saw a small OBD or on-board diagnostic module, for cars. By plugging the small device into a vehicle, it can gather heaps of data from the car ranging from engine settings to tire pressures to details about the electrical system.

A smarter connected car – no phone required

There are wired readers for such OBD modules, but why not add cellular connectivity? Without wires, a car rental agency could place these in their entire fleet of cars, for example, to monitor the vehicles for safety and maintenance.

As each car transmits its data, then, it could be aggregated in a centralized dashboard at the rental agency’s headquarters; you can’t easily do that with wires unless you want to pull every module daily and dock it.

Let’s get more efficient with our recycling pickups

I also got a glimpse at the BigBelly Solar recycling bin; not something you’d equate with a wireless company, right? It turns out that these public recycling bins — which use solar power for energy to compress waste — benefit from a cellular connection.

Each bin has sensors to monitor the level of recycled materials that are inside. With an M2M connection, the bins each report their waste capacity levels to the central recycling collection company.

If a bin is half-full or less, for example, the company doesn’t have to waste time or fuel to empty it right away. The collection company can see all of its bins on a map with green, yellow and red indicators — each representing the fullness of each bin — and route trucks only to the bins it needs to.

Look out Project Glass!

Speaking of trucks, you should soon see a new Verizon commercial with fire-trucks in it, if you haven’t already. One of the fireman in the piece is wearing a connected headset, similar to Google’s Project Glass. Because it’s connected, he can see a map or floor plan of the building on fire, presumably to help him navigate through the smoke.

This isn’t an application you’d want to use by tethering the goggles to a phone; this benefits from a dedicated wireless connection. And while it may sound far-fetched, one of Verizon’s Innovation Center partners was demonstrating a similar product meant not for consumers (darn!) but for public safety and industrial workers.

The network is waiting for connected devices of the future

I could go on and on describing what was on display: A connected athlete helmet with sensors to track hits in a football game; running shoes that upload their own data; even a smart meter that’s super smart: It can track and report energy consumption down to the individual circuit level. Oh there were some phones and traditional consumer products on display too. But they were on one small circular table that saw far fewer foot traffic during my time there.

Does everything need a dedicated cellular connection then? Certainly not and the smartphone is sure to be our hub of connectivity for some time to come. The Innovations Center, however, is enabling partners to “connectify” their products. Verizon’s just there to provide the connection itself and to help with the wireless integration. It’s up to the visionaries outside of Verizon to imagine how products and solutions can benefit from a robust wireless network.

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What soap and the smart grid have in common

Carol L. Stimmel, Research Director, Pike Research, a part of Navigant — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 07:00:00 +0000

“Cause-related marketing,” which aims to align the social issues that matter most to customers and the commercial goals of the business, has been proven to positively engage consumers. Dawn Saves Wildlife is a great example of this – the detergent-maker not only donates thousands of dollars to wildlife organizations, but has also developed an educational program about the impact of oil on wildlife and has donated thousands of bottles of Dawn to help clean animals impacted by oil pollution. The program helped Dawn make Fortune’s list of the World’s Most Admired Companies.

There are plenty of strong cause-related reasons for the deployment of smart grid technology: more efficient use of energy resources, a smaller carbon footprint, and consumer empowerment, to name a few. These are all are powerful motivators for customers to embrace the modernization of the power grid.

But efforts to improve consumer perceptions around the deployment of the smart grid, in particular smart meters, have mostly fallen flat. Compound that messaging failure with consumers’ suspicions that utilities want to take their personal control away, while simultaneously invading their privacy and poisoning them with radio frequency emissions, and the situation looks discouraging.

One conclusion is that commercial, utility and advocacy organizations that support smart grid roll-outs have simply not demonstrated that their efforts will benefit the causes that consumers support. What’s more, customers feel that messages about cost savings and enhanced efficiency opportunities are inauthentic, as many have already taken measures to reduce their electricity consumption during times of economic hardship.

The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative’s Pulse Wave 2 Study, suggests that there are two key messages that could raise the level of support for the smart grid among consumers:

Smart grid projects will create tens of thousands of jobs and bring an estimated $12 billion to the U.S. economy in the next two years.
Many components of our electricity grid are decades old and wearing out. Replacing them with smarter technology in a timely way will help ensure the consistent power delivery we depend on.

Will these kinds of messages change energy use actions in any kind of sustainable manner? They’re a piece of the puzzle, but in themselves they don’t define a successful program of customer engagement. Especially since, as Deloitte reported in its U.S.-focused 2012 reSources Study, that serious trust issues exist with utilities.

Many consumers – 73 percent, according to the Deloitte survey – believe that while they have done their part to conserve, their bills are still going up because utilities keep raising their rates. Justified or not, utilities have a reputation for being opportunistic, and smart grid programs are perceived as part of that opportunism. Utilities face a credibility gap.

To overcome that gap, messages to consumers about the smart grid must connect emotionally to consumers. These connections are critical to altering the often adversarial relationship between energy providers and their customers. Timely access to consumption information, peer comparisons, games and incentives will all help, but utilities must deliver on these promises with complete transparency to avoid the broken promises of early smart grid deployments.

U.S. customers expect energy service providers to address the needs of society by acting on their commitments and communicating efforts to improve the delivery of energy services in a way that gives consumers an authentic voice in these efforts. Because the deployment of a smarter grid addresses broad social concerns, such as climate change, security, and cost savings, there is an imperative to tackle these issues in the light of day.

The stakeholders in grid modernization efforts must include the energy consumer. When companies and consumers come together with a common cause, a virtuous cycle can begin.

Carol Stimmel is a research director responsible for leading Pike Research’s Smart Grid practice including key industry and client relationships, management of the research agenda for the practice, and personal contributions to consulting engagements and research reports. Stimmel has more than 20 years of experience in emerging technology markets including operating roles as well as extensive experience in market intelligence and analysis. She’s the author of a standard text on organizational management, The Manager Pool. She holds a BA in philosophy from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

Images courtesy of Al Howat.

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Why we need a standard for the Internet of things

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 19:19:22 +0000

The Internet of things is supposed to connect every aspect of our lives from our homes and cars to the objects we wear and the goods we consume. It’s even connecting ice machines. But one thing the Internet of things lacks is a unifying standard.

Devices will be connected by different radio technologies: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee and a host of 2G and mobile broadband cellular technologies. There’s really no way of assuring your “thing” will connect to the network or networks available at any given time.

The mobile industry is trying to rectify the problem, at least as it pertains to cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies. The bigger issue of fragmentation among bands and technologies isn’t going to get worked out anytime soon: You’re not going to connect a GSM wristwatch to a CDMA or Wi-Fi network. But often you can’t connect that GSM wristwatch to a GSM network either. Roaming among networks that use the same technology requires not only a business arrangement with each carrier but also a common protocol.

A group of global wireless-standards bodies are trying to tackle that problem. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) in the U.S. are working with their counterparts in Japan, Korea and China to develop a common “service layer” that can be embedded in every M2M device, making them compatible with M2M application servers hosted by any global operator.

At the end of the day, that means many of the devices in our Internet of things suddenly become untethered from specific networks. That wristwatch could work on AT&T as well as T-Mobile’s GSM network and then connect to Rogers Communications’ GSM towers when you fly into Toronto. Shipping containers embedded with M2M modules connect to whatever network is available at any port of call. The same wireless smart meter could be deployed in Kansas City or in Marrakesh without having to completely reconfigure its software.

Many things, many internets

Roaming among networks is possible today. The problem is those arrangements tend to be ad hoc deals put together by M2M service aggregators like Kore Telematics, which sort out all the underlying carrier deals and manage each network’s various protocols. Some operators have started taking matters into their own hands.

On Tuesday seven major operators — KPN, NTT DoCoMo, Rogers, SingTel, Telefónica, Telstra and Vimpelcom — formed an alliance to create a common M2M management platform allowing for the “delivery of a global product with a single SIM, eliminating roaming costs in the countries of participating operators.”

It sounds like a standard, but it’s not quite the same thing. All seven providers use the same M2M management platform supplied by Jasper Wireless, so they are able to bridge their difference through a common vendor. Still, the effort is admirable and could lead the creation of ad hoc interoperability among a large section of the world’s carriers. Jasper has many other customers besides those seven, including AT&T and America Movil.

A good example of a problem such cooperation could solve is the Kindle’s international predicament. Even though Amazon sells the Kindle all over the world it has one “home” network, AT&T. That means any Kindle user either living in or traveling to another country has to pay international download (read: roaming) fees to buy a new book or access a periodical subscription.

It’s fairly ridiculous that a multinational retailer like Amazon can’t support its flagship device internationally without resorting to such single-carrier arrangements. But if Amazon were to broker a deal with this new alliance, the Kindle would find itself at home on whichever of these seven networks it wandered onto.

There’s a possibility the industry will coalesce around a single proprietary technology such as Jasper’s, creating an ad hoc standard much like we see developing in the public-cloud space around Amazon Web Services. But an ad hoc standard isn’t a standard.

What we need is for the industry to get together and sort out a way to make every M2M device carrier and network agnostic. A gadget maker should be able to build a device that connects to the Internet of things without a specific carrier, a specific management platform or a specific application server in mind. The business deals with individual carriers would still need to be sorted out, but first we need remove the technology barriers. Otherwise we won’t wind up with a single Internet of things but instead many internets, each with its own separate sets of things.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user alexmillos; Standard photo courtesy of Shutterstock user almagami

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Crunching energy data down to the fridge

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 18:39:54 +0000

The data delivered by a smart meter is good at telling you how much overall energy your home has consumed. But what if you want to know if your fridge is an energy hog or if someone in your household is leaving the lights on all day? A four-year-old startup called PlotWatt has developed smart algorithms that can crunch energy data down to the appliance level to determine which of your household devices is sucking up more than its fair share of power.

While a lot of companies are tackling this problem, the key to what makes PlotWatt interesting is that the startup can monitor the energy consumption of individual appliances without using monitoring hardware. Other startups are selling sensors or smart plugs that can track the energy consumption of unique devices, but PlotWatt says its smart algorithms can determine this type of detail without any hardware at a greater than 90 percent accuracy level.

No hardware means a more capital-efficient business model, and it also means customers can more easily adopt the technology, PlotWatt CEO and founder Luke Fishback told me in an interview. The team spent over two years developing the algorithms that can produce that type of accuracy. Gadget giant Belkin bought a startup called Zensi a few years back that created algorithms that can do something similar by listening to the voltage noise of appliances.

PlotWatt, based in Durham, N.C., isn’t targeting residential homes first. For now it’s focused on selling its algorithms to restaurants and fast-food chains that are looking to use metrics to reduce their energy use, determine faulty appliances, or monitor how workers are using the energy-consuming tools in the restaurant (Why did Betty say she got to work at 8 a.m. if she only started the cooker up at noon?). Fast-food chains have low margins and are looking to optimize their systems every way they can.

The company already has pilot programs with several of the top 10 national restaurant chains, says Fishback, adding, “They love metrics.” Selling to fast-food chains first means PlotWatt can bring in revenue while the smart-meter and smart-grid markets mature.

While less than 4 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion electricity meters were smart in 2008, that figure grew to over 18 percent by 2012, and it is expected to jump to 55 percent by 2020, according to Pike Research. Smart meters can commonly deliver data to homes and utilities in up to 15-minute intervals.

Eventually PlotWatt will focus more on the residential market, which Fishback calls “the sleeping giant of the smart grid.” The company could sell its algorithms to utilities or other service providers, or it could partner with device makers. Picture a Nest thermostat telling you to turn your lights off.

PlotWatt recently closed a Series A round of $3 million from existing investors including Felicis Ventures and Acorn Ventures. Fishback tells me the company will use the funds to start to ramp up commercial deployments, and the team plans to hire sales, marketing and business development execs.

Smart-energy algorithms could provide a crucial tool for helping people, homes, businesses and factories become more energy efficient. Other companies that have developed energy data algorithms include Opower, Tendril, Nest, Viridity Energy and others.

Image courtesy of xJason.Rogersx

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AlertMe’s ‘huge’ UK gas deal: big data for real people

Bobbie Johnson — Tue, 22 May 2012 07:00:04 +0000

Smart energy startup AlertMe has struck a deal that could super-charge its expansion by providing its technology to the U.K.’s largest domestic energy supplier.

In an announcement on Tuesday, AlertMe — which runs a cloud-based service that monitors and analyzes people’s energy use and gives them detailed feedback — said it had been chosen by British Gas to provide its software to all its customers who have smart meters installed in their homes.

The utility giant has more than 15 million gas and electricity accounts around the country, with more than 10 million households on board. And while British Gas only started rolling out smart meters last year, the U.K. government has mandated that all British homes must be fitted with smart meters by 2020 to help avoid wastage and prevent unnecessary carbon emissions.

“It’s huge for us,” admitted AlertMe CEO Mary Turner when I talked to her ahead of the announcement. “The way I look at it, this is a huge deal for us, and a really innovative move from British Gas — but the important thing is the benefit it brings to the mass market.”

She said that customers would have their smart meters plugged into AlertMe’s energy monitoring service, which takes readings of energy use every 30 minutes and provides a variety of ways for them to drill down into that data. The aim is to reduce usage, cut carbon emissions and (crucially) save money — ultimately providing the benefits of big data to ordinary people in the place that’s most important to them: their own homes.

“There’s been so much talk about smart meters not really being smart, and for the convenience of the utility because they don’t have to pay to send a meter reader around,” said Turner. “But we turn that data into information and insight that’s much more relevant to the consumer.”

AlertMe doesn’t just work with gas usage, however: its platform works with a whole range of sensors and devices around the home. The ambition is for the system to become the backbone of an entire connected home, with an open platform that can deal with data coming from a wide range of appliances — electricity meters, TV sets, washing machines… anything.

We’re still at the start of a trend, but it’s been a good few months for the company. in January it announced a deal with Lowe’s to sell home energy gadets in-store (made by third parties and given the AlertMe seal of approval). And there could be another significant deal in the works in continental Europe, hinted Turner.

The Cambridge, U.K-based company, which has more than $37 million in funding from investors including Good Energies, Index Ventures and Vantage Point Capital. British Gas was already a strategic investor in the company, and had run some trials of AlertMe technology, but the deal was the result of a competitive tender put out last year.

But Turner said she saw this deal as the beginning of the company’s expansion, not its zenith — particularly as consumers look for a way to avoid the mess of standards and services that having a “smart home” entails.

“The fact that we have huge utilities practically engaging with us is a starting point, but our plan is not just to work with utilities,” she said. “We’re device agnostic and we absolutely, fundamentally believe it has to be that way. Walk around your home and you’ll have a dozen brands for all your appliances — the last thing a customer wants to do is have five or six different home hubs managing different devices.”

“Our view is that all of that will ultimately disappear.”

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Smart meter installations to decline in U.S. over next 2 years

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:49:48 +0000

Smart meters eventually will be ubiquitous globally over the next few decades, but, interestingly enough, installations of smart meters in the U.S. will actually sharply decline over the next two years, before they pick back up, according to Pike Research. Smart meter shipments in the U.S. will drop by a whopping 42 percent between 2011 and 2013, and after 2014 will start to gradually rise again.

One reason for the drop is because utilities in California — one of the leading states to install smart meters in the U.S. — will have finished many of the smart meter installation projects that they started a few years ago. PG&E installed close to 9 million meters by the end of 2011, and will finish its deployments by the middle of 2012. Southern California Edison has installed 4.3 million smart meters to date (close to its end goal) and likewise plans to complete all of its installations in 2012.

Another reason for the decline is that the Department of Energy gave smart meters a temporary injection a couple years ago. In late 2009, the DOE released billions of dollars for utilities’ smart grid programs, many of which included smart meter installations — 18 million meters were supposed to be installed with these funds. Many of these projects have gotten underway and either have already been completed or will be completed in the short term.

Pike Research vice president Bob Gohn writes that smart meter shipments over the next two years are facing “very dynamic and even volatile regional market characteristics, with dramatic shifts over the forecast period and very different communications technologies and standards. These swings make the market both enticing and challenging for smart meter and communications vendors.”

While this short term decline in U.S. smart meter shipments might cause hiccups for smart meter vendors and smart meter network makers, globally smart meter markets look just fine. While less than 4 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion electricity meters were smart in 2008, that figure grew to over 18 percent by 2012, and is expected to jump to 55 percent by 2020, according to Pike Research.

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Building a business case for smart meters

Chris King, eMeter — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:32:13 +0000

Utility regulators tend to put investments in newer technologies such as smart meters (or advanced metering infrastructure) under a microscope — even though they pay relatively little attention to ongoing investments such as substations and transformers. Fortunately, policymakers in over 30 states and countries have already found that the benefits of smart meters have exceeded the costs.

Here’s what you need to know about building a business case for smart meters.

For context, these analyses go back at least to the first comprehensive AMI analysis I did in 1990. However, the concepts are straightforward and still hold true today.

There are two basic types of smart meter costs:

Up-front (capital) costs include meters, communications, software, installation of field equipment, and implementation and integration of software — as well as the project management needed to make it all come together.
Ongoing costs include operating the communications network and software, managing the data, and maintaining equipment in the field as well as other elements in the system.

How much money are we talking about? We found in an earlier survey that the capital costs run about $250 per meter, with ongoing costs roughly $10-20 per meter per year.

Smart meter benefits are more fun. They include:

Reduced utility customer service costs. Meter reading, connect/disconnect, field visits, fewer estimated bills, shorter customer phone calls, better cash flow, and more savings.
Additional utility efficiencies. Better outage management, lower system losses, reduced energy theft, more targeted transmission and distribution system investment, avoided equipment overloads, etc.
Customer benefits. Enhanced energy efficiency, lower peak demand, more convenience through automation and online interaction with utilities, and intangible benefits such as improved customer satisfaction.

What do these benefits add up to? On average, for our over 30 examples (see our table below), estimated benefits total about $450 per meter. (To get this, we multiplied the average cost of $250 by 1.8 — the benefit-to-cost ratio from the table.)

As the table shows, sometimes utility benefits completely offset the costs — though in most cases some customer benefits are needed to make the overall business case positive.

Doing the math for your smart meter business case

Typically, utility regulators and other government officials and policymakers rely on utilities to provide this type of analysis before deciding whether to approve smart meter rollouts. The details of these calculations can get quite complex, so it’s important to focus on a couple of basic points.

Present your numbers as the “present value” of smart meter costs and benefits. This is the sum of the costs and of the benefits over project life (typically 15 years). Calculate the present value by looking at the cost or benefit for each year, then “discounting” back to today using an interest rate for the estimated cost of capital. This allows the costs and benefits to be compared apples-to-apples. When you subtract the present value of the costs from that of the benefits, you obtain an impressive-sounding “net present value” — one of the most common summary values on which policymakers rely.
Benefit to cost ratio. This is the benefits divided by the costs. For a project to proceed, this value should exceed 1.0. (That is, the benefits should be larger.) Typically this ratio also uses present value amounts, but it can be calculated using total lifetime costs.

Beyond these simple principles, the devil is in the details. For example, many states and countries argue for months or years over how to calculate the value of reducing peak demand by one kilowatt. For this reason, most smart meter business cases include a sensitivity analysis as well as estimates for low, medium, and high cases, or their equivalent. (Our table uses “medium” projections.)

Politics. Remember that both utilities and regulators have an incentive to be conservative on both costs and benefits. Utilities want to achieve their spending targets, and regulators want to achieve the expectations they set for customers. Few will complain if the targets are met; many will complain if they are not.

Tips for decision makers:

Use a credible expert to do this analysis — someone who has done it before and understands the economics. A neutral third party consultant may be helpful, but utility experts also are good.

Also, provide the opportunity for stakeholder input to benefit from “the wisdom of the crowd.” This is usually done via a formal ratemaking proceeding or a government consultation. It’s helpful to include sensitivity analyses.

And of course, use common sense. Are your results similar to those of others’ analyses? Are the differences explainable? Do the estimates seem realistic?

A good example is consumer energy savings: a recent study of over 100 smart meter pilot programs showed that smart energy feedback yields an average 8.7% drop in consumption. Yet the business cases we summarized in our table assume far more conservative reductions of 2-3%.

The best news about all this? These analyses have been done in many places, many times. We don’t need a brand new approach to smart meter or smart grid benefit-cost analysis; we just need to make good use of what other smart people have already done.

E-mail me if you would like the details for any of the analyses in this table.

View or download this spreadsheet from Google Docs. See complete table on original post.

This article originally appeared on eMeter’s Smart Grid Watch blog. Chris King is the Chief Regulatory Officer for eMeter. He is a nationally recognized authority on energy regulation and competitive energy markets, and is widely recruited by regulators and legislators to consult on technology issues in electric restructuring and grid management.

Image courtesy of SunDazed, DSebourn, Sarah Elizabeth Simpson, rainy city.

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75% of U.S. electric meters will be smart by 2016

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:00:49 +0000

Despite some of the push back from a very vocal but tiny group, smart meters in the U.S. are coming — and fast. According to research group NPD, 75 percent of the electric meters in the U.S. will be smart, digital meters by 2016.

Other research groups have predicted that the rate of the installation of smart meters will be a bit slower in the U.S. Last year Berg Insight predicted that the penetration rates for smart meters would reach 50 percent by 2016 in the U.S. and close to 100 percent by 2020.

According to a report last year from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), referencing data from the Institute for Electric Efficiency (IEE) and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the penetration rate for smart meters was at around 13 to 18 percent as of late 2011. Back in 2009, the penetration rate was about 6.5 percent for smart meters in the U.S.

Part of this smart meter push came via the $4 billion in funding from the stimulus package. President Obama had a goal back in 2009 to have 40 million smart meters and 3,000 miles of transmission lines installed. NPD also says that because the stimulus money has been allocated and is being spent, there was a peak of smart meter installation growth in 2011, and the rate of installation will be slower in the coming years.

Silver Spring Networks, one of the largest smart meter network companies in the U.S., has 22 million connected devices under management as of March, up from the 17 million connected smart-grid devices it disclosed it was connecting in December 2011.

NPD also says in its report:

Globally, smart meter revenue will surpass $12 billion in 2016.
ZigBee is the smart meter home-area network technology leader, while powerline and wireless are leading for smart meter backhaul.
China will deploy 280 million smart meters by 2016.

Images courtesy of Portland General and FERC.

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7 smart grid projects that are turning heads

Liz Enbysk, SGN Managing Editor — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:32:28 +0000

We’re at a juncture in the smart grid market where utilities are moving beyond the expected and taking next steps with advanced technologies – from the flywheel systems protecting Austin Energy’s new control center to SAIC’s “Smart Grid as a Service” that supports critical energy management systems in remote Alaskan villages. We’ve compiled these seven smart grid projects that we’re pretty sure you’ll find interesting:

1). Austin Energy using VYCON flywheel systems to protect its new control center

Instead of using traditional battery-based uninterruptible power systems (UPS) for its new control center, Austin Energy chose flywheels from Los Angeles-based VYCON to increase power backup reliability. “Flywheel UPSs are rapidly becoming the defacto choice for power protection when reliability is the key concern,” said Dann McKeraghan, sales and marketing vice president for VYCON. “This, coupled with their environmental advantages, and you have a win-win value proposition.” Austin Energy’s 190,000-square-foot Control Center operates the utility’s data center and operates the utility’s grid including the switching of utility grid quadrants. Read more here.

2). 4 Alaskan villages using SAIC’s smart grid as a service

The first implementation of the “Smart Grid as a Service (SGS)” offering from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) has been up and running since Dec. 12, (we told you about it in How to manage 150,000 meters with a staff of zero). Intelligent Energy Systems hired SAIC to implement an energy management platform in four Alaska villages. “The challenges of climate, environment, and information technology are especially great in these regions,” said SAIC Assistant Vice President of Smart Grid, Steve Root. “SGS will deliver the immediate advantage of on-demand meter reads, improved operational efficiency, as well as reduced energy costs and will support critical energy management decisions throughout the remote regions of Alaska.” Read more here.

Honeywell's thermostat with Opower software

3). Hawaiian Electric and Honeywell test Fast DR for integrating clean power

Hawaiian Electric Co. in Honolulu is teaming with Honeywell in a two-year pilot project to demonstrate how demand response technology can help integrate more intermittent renewable energy to the electric grid. Working with commercial and industrial customers, Hawaiian Electric will conduct a test of “fast demand response” (Fast DR) technology, which gives the utility and facilities the tools to reduce demand within 10 minutes of notification of a pending imbalance between supply and demand. Companies receive an incentive to participate and when Fast DR events are triggered they receive an additional per-kilowatt-hour incentive credit, which Honeywell says can translate into thousands of dollars in annual savings. Read more here.

4). Encorp’s latest military microgrid is serving Fort Sill

The Fort Sill Army Base in Oklahoma, home to 20,000 permanent personnel and sites that train nearly 20,000 new artillery soldiers each year, is the fifth military / defense site where Fort Collins, CO-based Encorp has installed a microgrid. The installation is designed to provide around-the-clock, reliable onsite energy to offset utility power consumption at the massive 94,000-acre base. As Encorp officials explain it, the Fort Sill system links four generator sets that were installed years ago. Operators remotely dispatch the generators using Encorp controls that can interconnect just one generator with the base’s utility grid, or all at once. When the grid fails, Encorp controls allow the generators to operate independently. When grid connected, the microgrid can dispatch one megawatt of power at the mission critical facility. Read more here.

5). BPA pilot tests grid flexibility to accommodate variability of renewables

The Bonneville Power Administration is teaming with two Pacific Northwest utilities to determine if increasing the frequency of communication between wind suppliers and the electric grid will help the system adjust to fluctuations more effectively. According to a report in Sustainable Business Oregon, Portland General Electric and Snohomish PUD have agreed to provide twice-an-hour scheduling of wind transmissions through the BPA system – up from the once-an-hour schedule in place for a century. The goal is to allow BPA to better manage its reserves. Read more here.

6). Con Edison teams with Siemens and TIBCO to improve network reliability

A stimulus-funded smart grid demonstration project in New York leverages TIBCO’s enterprise messaging technology and Siemens’ integration experience. There are a number of project objectives, including to improve smart grid reliability and to provide Con Edison customers with greater visibility, flexibility and value. The demonstration will also look at enhancing control capabilities for existing smart grid assets and managing daily system peaks via demand response. “New York is home to one of the most critical finance infrastructures in the world and the most pervasive big building management systems,” notes Murat Sonmez, a TIBCO EVP. “The ability to use real-time data to manage system assets, detect early warning signs and act immediately to resolve potential problems before they occur, is necessary to maintain predictable power and help keep businesses running.” Read more here.

7). Wake Electric member gets a familiar looking smart meter

Cute story out of North Carolina where member-owned Wake Electric is implementing a Sensus FlexNet AMI system to more than 35,000 members in a seven-county area. And one of the recent recipients of a smart meter at his house was Wake Electric member and Sensus CEO and President Peter Mainz. Sensus says the AMI program Wake Electric is implementing operates over a secure, wireless network using licensed spectrum for two-way, dedicated communication to residential electric meters as well as power distribution assets. It will replace a current single-read drive-by system that has been in service for the past decade. Read more here.

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Itron to acquire SmartSynch for $100M for smart grid tech

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:18:50 +0000

Meter giant Itron has made a rare smart grid acquisition. On Wednesday afternoon Itron announced that it plans to acquire smart grid cellular networking company SmartSynch in a deal worth around $100 million. SmartSynch has championed the use of cellular networks for utilities’ smart grid projects and says it has 130 customers, including nine of the top ten utilities in the U.S.

By my calculations the 12-year-old company, based in Jackson, Miss., raised its first venture capital rounds from Nth Power, Siemens Venture Capital and Kinetic Ventures back in its first couple of years of existence, and by 2003, had raised $35 million in venture funds. Then more recently, the company followed up with $20 million in 2008, another $11 million in debt and options two years ago, and another $25.67 million in debt and options a year ago. So at least $90 million in funding.

Beyond its cellular smart grid network tech, SmartSynch in recent years has created a developer program with Qualcomm, worked on a prepaid electric meter service with startup PayGo, and launched its universal smart grid router in late 2009.

While SmartSynch has a lot of meters installed at commercial and industrial sites, its residential deployments have been fairly sparse to date. Those include a 10,000-home trial with AT&T and Texas New Mexico Power set to expand to 231,000 meters in the next five years, as well as partnerships with Verizon and Sprint.

It’s clear by now that cellular networks will make up a significant portion of utilities’ smart grid plans. In recent weeks Silver Spring Networks and Cisco also said they will be using cellular for a portion of the grid. Itron competes with Silver Spring Networks and others for smart grid networking, as well as being a giant smart meter maker. Itron’s shares shot up 6.5 percent in afterhours trading.

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