In the area of home energy management, Microsoft and Google made two mistakes: failing to fully understand the needs of the application, resulting in "solutions" that offered limited real value; and abandoning this nascent market, which is destined to be a significant global opportunity for any vendor with a solution that satisfies the market's needs.
Their failings are understandable because electricity is a peculiar market. Consumers take it for granted. Regulators tightly control it. Utilities struggle to satisfy consumers while being constrained by the regulatory oversight.
Worst of all, the relationship between supply and demand is upside-down: In virtually every other market, as prices go up, demand goes down. But with electricity, wholesale prices increase during peak periods while retail prices remain constant, creating a problem for utilities.
Without demand response capable of reacting to pricing signals, the peak will ultimately exceed generating capacity, as it did in Texas last winter (a summer peaking region!).
Reducing peak demand is the driving force for consumer-connected home energy management, where the VERGE paradigm applies fully. Indeed, the convergence of energy, information, buildings and transportation will forever change the way people use, conserve, store and make energy at home.
Home Energy Management Today
A single word summarizes the status of the home energy management (HEM) industry today: pilots. Pilots are the best way for the industry to experiment with various solutions prior to implementing full-scale demand response programs for reducing peak demand (typically on hot summer days and cold winter days).
A good example of a successful pilot is the one at Oklahoma Gas and Electric Company (OG&E), where smart thermostats enabled residential consumers to achieve a peak reduction of about 1.9 kilowatts per home (while saving money), far surpassing the utility's goal of 1.3 kW.
The OG&E pilot used its newly installed advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to communicate with the ZigBee-based wireless Home Area Network via smart meters. In other cases, where the utilities have yet to deploy AMI, a broadband Internet gateway can be used.
The smart thermostat, which directly controls the customer's single largest energy device, the HVAC equipment, also uses ZigBee to communicate with switches on other loads targeted for demand response, especially water heaters, window air conditioners, portable space heaters and pool pumps.
Next page: Home energy management in 2020
This article provides an
This article provides an overly optimistic perspective that glosses over very difficult implementation issues. Optimism is necessary because it encourages individuals and companies to take the risks inherent in the development of more efficient and cleaner sources of energy. Optimism is not so good when it overstates expectations and understates or distracts us from solving the real implementation issues.
Let's start with Zigbee SEP 2.0 - contrary to Mr.Szablya's claim, SEP 2.0 is not finished, it is not yet a standard and as a result it is far from proven and extensible. SEP 2.0 has technical and political problems. Unrealistic expectations have distracted the industry from objectively examining other potentially better and less costly alternatives.
Let's conclude with electric vehicles (EV), which make SEP's problems look like a minor inconvenience. At a recent California Public Utility Commission workshop it became very clear that the SAE standards that link EV communication to the utility meter communication network and SEP 2.0 won't happen. The utility meter communication network can't provide real-time communication. Now on to the bigger problems - how do you meter EV usage, who reads the meter, how are EVs billed, what rate are they charged, who pays for the meter, and lets not forget another critical issue - how do you manage EV charging and prevent distribution system problems?