EnergyBiz - September/October 2007 - (Page 61) years. These will start small, but there will be over a 3- to 5-year rollout,” says Philip Mezey, Itron Inc. senior vice president and chief operating officer. Also, changes and innovations made over the course of the installation contracts and beyond will be made via software and firmware upgrades, not by dismantling devices to replace hardware components. Another factor is that partnering and licensing arrangements have been entered into to meet the massive demands in any particular jurisdiction, which are usually greater than one company can provide. Manufacturers say they have anticipated increased demand and have made arrangements with their suppliers. “Our smart AMI meter has been in production for four years. Typically, growing pains are more prevalent when an all-new product is being introduced versus upgrades to an established technology,” says Mike Longrie, Elster’s director of product management. But for new technology, many agree that the metering industry must take a page out of the Internet playbook, along with other industries, and adopt open standards. This is especially true for a mechanical device that formerly was expected to last for decades. Manufacturers will need to anticipate the changes that will be needed over the useful life, to download new firmware, which would be done from a central location. A single feature that may have produced a competitive advantage in the past no longer holds, as meters must have a variety of features, especially the ability to be upgraded more readily as technical innovations advance. “The marketplace will want meter vendors to be able to integrate other vendors’ communications technologies into their meters. Utilities are realizing that this is the only way to ensure true interoperability,” Longrie says. Although potentially troublesome, technical standards demanded by regulators in the coming years do not seem to be an especially daunting issue, the vendors say. And meter manufacturers see their technology as becoming even more important as a way to lessen the carbon footprint of utilities through efficiency. “Today, the primary purpose of a meter is as a billing device and it will become an energy-management device when we enable time-of-use meters,” says SmartSynch CEO Stephen Johnston, whose products communicate metering information over public wireless networks. Certainly the way that is done on a large scale is through the demand response programs offered to larger commercial customers. Many of the tools are available to commercial customers but scaling them to the retail level remains a challenge. The pricing models available at the retail level will have to encourage individuals to model their behavior. The meter itself has become more of a system component in demand response, which really requires a change in behavior. For demand response to fulfill its potential, multiple technical communication nodes must support these devices, Johnston adds. They must communicate with appliances. For example, a freezer should run the defrost cycle at times of low demand, rather than when electricity prices are highest. RF mesh networks have become popular because of they can support multiple radio frequencies, offer great path diversity for the metering data and provide a robust solution for most environments, Longrie adds. Jeff Lund, Echelon Corp. vice president of business development, says the technical innovations that already exist and are being refined include networking and information collection. “Two-way connection with a web service interface allows for remote upgrades and this system is enabling better power quality data to be collected,” he says. Itron’s Mezey explains that in reducing the carbon footprint the “meter will be primarily an enabler because all programs to be viable will really need to verify the results to evaluate what happened before and after their deployment.” And he sees a different and greater role for smart meters. Rather than just report, as in net metering, the smart meters of the future will need to communicate what is being produced by distributed generation in real time, as a way to better integrate renewables into the overall generation mix. 62 E n E rgyB i z September/October 2007
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