Smart Electric Newsletter #5

Articles featured this week in your Smart Electric Newsletter:

• ZigBee makes electric outlets smart
• Gazprom Marketing & Trading buys into Smart Metering
• Smart Meters in UK could cost £20bn
• The Smart Grid Transportation Utility

Featured articles this week:

ZigBee makes electric outlets smart

Energy Optimizers Limited (EOL) has developed a ZigBee-based plug-in electricity meter that can help companies and households shave hundreds to thousands of dollars off their electricity bills. The U.K. company's device, called the plogg, allows home- and building-owners to monitor how much electricity is being used by individual appliances and electronic devices so that energy efficiency can be improved.

Recent studies by the British government and the Carbon Trust show that people can save five to 15 percent of the electricity they use by using smart meters to manage energy demands.

The plogg is a combined smart meter plug and data logger, based on Ember's ZigBee wireless technology running on a Telegesis module. It can be attached to any electrical appliance or device that uses a standard UK 13 Amp or European 16 Amp plug. A plogg for the North American market is currently under evaluation.

The plogg stores the measured electricity data and wirelessly communicates this information to a PC, mobile phone or building management system anywhere in the world through an Internet-linked Ethernet gateway. For instance, a restaurant chain could use ploggs to monitor energy use by refrigeration and air conditioning units, with all the information collected at a central point via the Internet. Upon discovering that some air conditioners were left on after business hours, the plogg would allow them to switch off air conditioning units by remote activation, or alert a manager that a unit needs servicing. The plogg meters can support a range of other wireless-based energy saving devices as well, such as temperature and light level sensors.

Using Ember's EM250 ZigBee "system-on-chip" transceiver and EmberZNet PRO wireless mesh networking software running on a Telegesis module, a network of ploggs can self organize to provide robust coverage of the home or building. The plogg can act as an end device, a router or ZigBee coordinator. It is available as a stand-alone end-user device, or part of an energy reporting network, or as an embeddable device for OEM products.

In addition to measuring power consumption, a real-time clock function allows time-of-usemetering information for multi-rate applications. Data logging can be set from one minute to one month. The meter samples voltage and current signals 50 times per AC cycle, at a sampling rate of 2520 Hz.

"Telegesis embedded devices provided us with a straightforward, cost effective and importantly, a quick route to market," said Shaun Merrick, general manager at EOL. "With the release from Ember of EmberZNet PRO 3.1, we now have the means to deliver micro building management systems, incorporating compatible energy controls such as light, presence and temperature sensors."

The EM250 is an 802.15.4/ZigBee compliant semiconductor system that integrates a programmable microprocessor, RF radio, network protocol stack and memory into a tiny, singlechip solution (7mm on a side). It offers EOL dramatic reductions in component size, cost and power consumption, and increased range due to its very high sensitivity. The EM250 runs EmberZNet PRO 3.1, Ember's enhanced ZigBee PRO compliant networking stack.

The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, costeffective, low-power, wirelessly networked monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. The ZigBee Alliance is a rapidly growing, non-profit industry consortium of leading semiconductor manufacturers, technology providers, OEMs, and end-users worldwide.

Membership is open to all. Additional information can be found at www.zigbee.org.

Source: www.zigbee.org

Gazprom Marketing & Trading buys into Smart Metering

Gazprom Marketing & Trading - the UK-based subsidiary of the World's biggest natural gas company - announced that it has taken an equity stake in a leading automated meter reading supplier.

The company, TruRead, provides a series of creative technologies and solutions which enable meters for gas, electricity, water and other commodities to be read remotely and data transferred without human intervention.

This remote data allows consumers to measure energy use in near real time which enables them to better manage their energy consumption and carbon footprint, 'Smart metering is the technology of the future,' said Vitaly Vasiliev, CEO of Gazprom Marketing & Trading.

'With rising public and regulatory concern about the need to reduce carbon emissions, this proprietary technology will enable multi-commodity consumers to be more energy efficient and to control their energy use more easily and cost-effectively,' said Vasiliev. 'TruRead will be able to give its customers an even better service, while offering new, added value products, like low cost AMR solutions. This is in line with our goal to be a leader of diversified energy services.'

Simon Slater, Managing Director of TruRead, said: 'Today is a momentous occasion for TruRead, it gives us the green light to develop our products and services further, both in the UK and globally'. 'We believe our new product range to be a unique service, which we can quickly begin to market to our customers', Slater added TruRead provides a managed data service through Automated Meter Reading (AMR) and offers a complete, integrated set of services, for end-to-end collection and delivery of meter reading, for electricity, gas and water, using cutting-edge technology at a competitive price. The service starts with the installation of the meter or data-logger and ends with accurate, timely reads, along with an ad-hoc data retrieval service.

TruRead can provide a wide range of delivered data, ranging from simple and accurate billing reads, through to daily or half-hourly consumption data. 'Smart meters' scheme for UK could cost up to £20bn.

Source: TruRead

Smart Meters in UK could cost £20bn

Tim Webb in The Observer (Sunday March 16, 2008) wrote that the implementation of Smart Meters on every home in the UK could costs as much as £20bn discussed how this may be passed onto the consumer. Click here to see the full article on The Observer website.

Click here for Source

The Smart Grid Transportation Utility

Every one should agree that "It is clear that dramatic change is coming in the future for the electric utility industry and the way energy is generated, delivered and consumed substantially changing the whole business model. This change is coming to a piece of the industry that hasn't been known for radical change over its 120 plus year history... Implementation of the Smart Grid will require a complete rethinking of the utility business model and business processes."

Such dramatic and radical change is leading to an emergent smart grid transportation utility to replace today's utilities, with customer oriented front office and back office activity done today by the enterprise side of the utility and power generation front office and back office activity becoming competitive activities at the federal level.

A complete rethinking of the industry structure has already been done during the past two years in the Energy Central Network and what has emerged is the Electricity Without Price Controls (EWPC) market architecture and paradigm shift. As a result there is a grand vision as can be seen in the EWPC article Value Creation for the Customers to shift from the "compliance-based industry in which utilities operate," to one that "offer enough incentive for consumers, [generators and retailers] to take the difficult steps necessary to make electrical energy markets operate efficiently."

In sum, the utility as we know it evolves as the smart grid becomes the transportation utility under central planning. Shifting from price controls to prudential regulation, generation and customer facing front and back office activities will become free market activities as can be seen in the EWPC article Free Market and Central Planning, Under R1E2. R1E2 is the policy system reliability first, economy second, that gives priority to "real-time/near real-time" generation, transportation and demand power system smart grid activities with respect to economic free market activities.

Source: Jose Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio