Saturday, March 6, 2010

Charles McParland: Do Not Limit Energy Signals to the AMI

On the subject of whether AMI should be the only, or primary, data path for energy price and DR signaling, I feel that, given the current rate of innovation in the energy services domain, it would be imprudent public policy to limit or even target residential or commercial energy signals to only utilize AMI infrastructure. Energy system designs can readily accommodate multiple communications paths and overall system reliability will benefit by allowing multiple paths through which energy service information can be communicated. Currently, public IP infrastructure provides reliable, high-speed communications to over 60% of US households. There is no security or architectural reason to preclude its use as an important and already deployed infrastructure useful for non-real time critical energy signal communications to residential electrical power consumers.

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