Friday, March 5, 2010

Michael Weissman: Primary Goal should be to Help Consumers

This posted to smartgrid@ostp.gov by Michael Weissman, CopperGate Communications<

Q1: The smart meter is only one of many potential communications devices that will exist in many U.S. residences. Today, service providers such as security firms, ISPs, and pay-TV service providers already provide home networks that can be easily expanded to support energy management. By mandating that the utility’s smart meter act as the primary gateway for residential energy usage data, price data and demand response signals, consumer choice will be severely limited. By giving an unfair competitive advantage to energy providers over other types of service providers – all without guaranteeing better performance, innovation, a smarter grid, lower prices or improved energy conservation, NIST would be creating a monopolistic environment that would have no incentive to innovate or to make customer satisfaction a priority.

We believe the smart meter can serve as an option – but should not be considered the sole option. Moreover, nothing architecturally should be mandated for the smart meter that tries to stifle competitive technologies, architectures or services. This includes mandating that smart meters acquire device-level data, require a specific MAC/PHY protocol or control devices within the home.

Furthermore, as the typical home usually includes a primary gateway for broadband access, mandating the smart meter to be a primary gateway may be redundant from an architectural point of view.

Since the topic of discussion is energy, there is a presumption that all communications between the consumer and the energy producer should be handled through the energy distribution network. This is logical from the producer perspective, yet the consumers communicate in many manners that are distinct from the energy distribution network.

Furthermore, there are many architectural, behavioral, marketplace and political constraints including:

1. The smart meter tends to exist outside the residence instead of inside. This creates many technical challenges that are difficult to overcome including distance from the meter to the gateway inside the home, building construction constraints and so forth. As a result, most smart meters today do not talk to the home area network and the current technologies are too weak and immature to reliably deliver affordable communication to the home area network. While new standards aim to improve the communications between the meter and the HAN, these standards are not yet finalized, nor proven in real-world environments. NIST shouldn’t mandate technologies that haven’t been sufficiently validated in the field. Carrier-grade communications technologies often take years of lab and field-testing before they are standardized by service providers. For example, in Texas, HomePlug was considered an acceptable potential standard for smart meters, yet not a single deployment of HomePlug for smart meters has been approved by the Texas PUC. This isn’t to say that at some time in the future that powerline standards such as HomePlug , G.hn, G.hnem or wireless communications standards such as Z-Wave couldn’t fully meet the requirements desired by the U.S. Government. It is just that today the performance has not been sufficiently validated.

2. Utility company historically has terminated at the edge of the home and the boundary between utility property and private property is clearly defined. Changes in this demarcation should not be taken lightly. Any presumptions that the utility needs to penetrate into the home to receive the full benefits of the smart grid are inaccurate. Demand response signals can be delivered through many communications mechanisms such as broadband, SMS messaging, email messaging, outbound IVR phone calls, radio signals and many other methods. Using a smart meter is clearly a viable option, it is, nonetheless not the sole mechanism. NIST should embrace the potential innovation industry can bring to making the smart grid affordable and simple. Not every good idea has been considered yet.

3. Utility-based infrastructures tend to have very long life cycles of 20-30 years. Consumer electronics and appliances have much shorter life cycles – often as little as 3-4 years. Communications technologies often have even shorter life cycles. As way of example, when the worldwide web was introduced, the leading communications solutions were 2400 baud. Today, we have service providers offering 100 Mbit/s and even more. This is a 100,000x increase in performance - all within a 20 year period – shorter than the life expectancy for smart meters today. Imagine if the U.S. government had mandated that the Internet be standardized on the 2400 baud modem. What kind of innovations would not exist today as a result? The same applies for the smart grid. The U.S. government should limit the scope of the smart grid to the edge of the home, provide a common way demand response data is distributed and let market innovation occur without government intervention. For the smart grid to achieve its greatest potential, it should model itself like the Internet where innovation was allowed to thrive with very light regulation – including points at the edge of the network.

4. Consumers like to save money and most are happy to reduce demand to save the environment, too. The primary goal should be to help consumers learn about their energy consumption and learn how to reduce their power effectively. Yet, at the center of this notion is the consumer maintaining control over what they would like to do and how. Consumers like the ability to decide whether they want to reduce power – without mandate. Some consumers will prefer to create automated load shedding based upon input from the grid. Other consumers will like the option to choose whether they want to shed demand or not. In the latter case, the consumer, not the network is the decision maker. This is an architecturally profound difference. If the consumer is the decision-maker, then the request to shed power should be delivered to the consumer, not to the home.

Americans are a mobile population. When a consumer is mobile, abroad or otherwise away from the home, then the data should follow the user there. As a result, the smart meter may not be the best place to distribute load-shedding requests. It might be more beneficial for the utility to share these requests via SMS, email, outbound IVR voice calls or electronic broadcasts shared with third party service providers such as pay-tv providers, security firms or ISPs to make it easy for the consumer to receive these requests in time. Today, solutions such as Z-Wave already provide iPhone applications that allow for turning off lights and changing the temperature. There is no need for a smart meter in this existing application (see iPhone 3g commercial with Schlage (http://www.apple.com/iphone/gallery/ads/#family-travel-small)

5. Energy distribution companies may not be the sole suppliers of power. Consumers may generate their own power such as via solar, wind or fuel cell. In these cases, there is no reason why the utility should be accessing information about consumer power generation – except in cases where generation is providing power to the grid. If a consumer is not consuming power from the grid, the utility has no compelling interest or right to access any information about demand requirements. Additionally, that consumer may want to track energy consumption and will utilize home energy management solutions that are independent from the grid’s solutions.

6. Currently, the smart grid is a closed network not open to the public Internet. In contrast, the home area network is likely to be tied into the Internet. Technologies like Z-Wave, HomePlug , G.hn and others directly tie into gateways with direct access to the Internet. As a result, if the smart meter is connected to the home area network, it exposes the entire smart grid to the public Internet – possibly in ways that could make the grid more vulnerable.

Q2: Gateways are an excellent option for managing the home area network. However, they are not mandatory for the achievement of the smart grid. For example, a device such as a refrigerator could directly receive demand response signal via the cellular network and not require a gateway. The key notion is the device needs a way to become aware of a desire to reduce consumption. This could come from a manual intervention (i.e. a customer turning off a device), an automated response (i.e. a device that is pre-programmed to reduce energy consumption for a set period of time if a load shed request is made) or other more dynamic mechanisms. However, it is not necessary for the device itself to share its new behavior back to the utility. The utility will see the result of the new behavior by monitoring changes in aggregate demand from each residency. Ultimately, the utility has a compelling interest to know aggregate power. It does not have a compelling interest to know which devices are requesting that power.

Moreover, in the same way that the smart meter could give an unfair advantage to the utility, data gateways from other service providers shouldn’t be mandated for the same reason. The marketplace should drive the decision and allow customers to choose what is best for their needs and circumstances.

Michael Weissman
Vice President, Marketing
CopperGate Communications, A Sigma Designs Company

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