My comments are specific to home area networks and residential/small business consumers, but hopefully will also logically extend to cover the more complex requirements of commercial and industrial electricity consumers.
I believe a necessary first step is to require the inclusion of HAN technology in all future government-supported smart metering initiatives. Forcing a specific standard or communicating protocol at this time is premature, and realistically we've already missed the window for mandating HAN support in the current batch of SGIG-funded metering initiatives. Instead we should re-focus our efforts on providing appropriate levels of motivation and resources to existing standards bodies, helping them to achieve our desired objectives and outcomes.
I would presently prefer to see the work of several different alliances and standards groups promoted, with greater emphasis and pressure placed on standards harmonization, open source licensing terms, and additional HAN-related education services for utility implementers, 3rd parties, and consumers.
The capital markets should ultimately determine which technical approaches, standards, and implementations are most successful. Smart meters are the producers of consumption data and absolutely should be the primary gateway for passing energy use information to devices inside the home or business. I believe we are doing a major disservice to consumers if we don’t promote solutions and system design practices that allow real-time access to energy use information. Also, keep in mind that utility requirements for energy use data are generally quite different from those of consumers (e.g. 15-min billing intervals versus real-time data access). As such, AMI networks and utility systems are not (and probably should not be) designed to support real-time collection of energy use data for an entire service territory of consumers. Certainly demand response and pricing signals from the utility can take several alternative paths to the consumer (e.g. broadband Internet, cellular) but existing AMI network technologies are already fairly well-suited for those types of broadcast (or one-to-many) messages.
As the founder of a technology start-up building an energy management gateway, I am in favor of consumer choice and market-based selection. I believe any standards promoted by NIST and/or other government agencies should not preclude or prevent the use of an ESI or gateway device by the consumer (or utility). In my opinion the ESI does offer a more flexible approach - greater features, superior upgradability, better separation of concerns, etc.
I would not suggest that it should be the primary or only interface for all consumer use cases and utility deployment scenarios, however, I think it is vitally important to establish a significant install base of HAN-enabled smart meters, even if that means several standards are initially in widespread deployment. So long as each utility is selecting vendors that use open standards and apply non-restrictive licensing terms, 3rd party market participants will have financial incentives to create devices and solutions that bridge differences between AMI deployments and the various communicating standards used by consumer-owned devices. As others have mentioned, we are already seeing early interoperability work from organizations like the U-SNAP Alliance, sponsored research from NIST and the DoE , as well as efforts by individual technology providers and start-up companies.
We need take actions that promote improved standardization and open design, but this is a complex problem and building consensus amongst so many stakeholders will take time.
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