Landis+Gyr, a smart meter manufacturer, offers its Gridstream two-way smart grid communication network for AMR. It is in the process of completing the installation of 280,000 smart meters by August and has so far installed 165,000 of them in Austin Energy's utility facilities.

Silver Spring Networks is a manufacturer of networking boards for power meters that monitor and curb electricity, gas and water consumption. It has sold more than 2 million nodes for a wireless IP network that handles smart metering and other grid applications. The network uses a 912 to 928-MHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) card that delivers 100-kbit/sec point-to-point links on mesh networks that can span more than a mile or a single hop.

Florida Power & Light is using 100,000 Silver Spring Networks IP-based meters, the largest advanced AMI system in the U.S. Silver Spring Networks' solution include UtiIOS, a special network operating system; and UtilityIQ, a network management platform handling AMR, advanced network management, and data management.

One company that prides itself on offering a total AMI solution is Trilliant Inc. Bill Vogel, Trilliant's founder and senior vice president of strategic development says “Trilliant's aim is to bring all grid networking solutions together.” Unlike vendors that focus on wireless communications networks only, the company offers a wireless, RF mesh network operating system, communications chips, a gateway for collecting data from groups of meters, network management tools, and remote control tools for DR, load control and distribution monitoring.

A Rosy Future For The Smart Grid

Even Google Ventures has gotten into the smart grid act by investing in Silver Springs Networks. Google has a prototype PowerMeter. It receives information from a utility's small meter and management devices and lets subscribers access their home electricity consumption on their iGoogle homepage.

Figure 4

Finally, customers of German energy company Energie Baden-Wuttenberg (EnBW) can also watch their energy use in real time on the Internet to get a handle on their energy consumption. As part of a campaign to install intelligent electricity meters in private homes, the company is integrating each meter into a networked communication and billing system.

Inside a smart grid power meter

Market forecasters foresee a rosy future for smart grid. One firm in this camp is BCC Research. It divides up the smart grid market into four segments: communications; sensing measurement and control; distributed energy generation and storage; and transmission lines. Distributed energy generation and storage accounts for the largest share, $12.2 billion last year and $!3.3 this year, growing to $22.1 billion by 2014. It considers sensing measurement and control the next largest segment, followed by communications technologies.

The ARC Advisory Group is equally bullish. It forecasts a North American market for a smart grid and an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to grow at a CAGR of 20.6% over the next five years.

As for smart grid metering, the core of the smart grid, Gartner chip analyst Stephen Ohr calls it a sizeable growth opportunity. He recently estimated that more than 150 million smart meters will be installed worldwide in the next five years, with half of those in North America. Gartner expects those five years to bring as much as $2 billion in business opportunities for semiconductor and chip makers.

Resources

Old-style electromechanical induction meters count the revolutions of an aluminium disc as a measure of consumed power. The more power used, the faster the disc rotates. Rotation comes from magnetic flux generated by two coils, one producing flux proportional to voltage, the other generating flux proportional to current. The resulting eddy current (plus damping from a permanent magnet) makes the disc rotate at a speed proportional to the power consumed. A worm gear coupled to the disc spindle drives either an odometer-like display or dial pointers reading out watt-hours of usage.

In contrast, solid-state power meters typically use inductive coupling to the power line as a means of measuring electrical current. This combined with a voltage measurement lets them compute power consumption. In a smart grid system, solid-state power meters may also incorporate radio transceivers for communication with other smart grid components.

One such scheme is that used in the GoodWatts system developed by Watt Shifters, Richmond, Va., and used in a pilot project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It uses a gateway installed in the home that connects to the home's internet connection. The gateway communicates with WattShifter servers through a secure link over the public internet to send and receive connection, control, command, and monitoring data. In the home, the gateway serves as the host of a wireless mesh network and also serves as the brains of the home control network. The thermostat, a load control meter, and electric meter then communicate with the gateway to receive control commands, report historical data and exceptions, and indicate when control actions take place or when humans override them. Electric utilities can connect to the server and take broader control actions to maintain grid integrity and manage peak demand. Back at the server, all the control and trend information is stored in a database that includes 15-minute data for every device in every home. This lets homeowners and utilities review the historical performance of the various components and make better energy management decisions.

U.S. Department of Energy, “Preparing for Tomorrow's Challenges,” National Smart Grid Conference, Spokane, WA, April 6, 2009

Upgrading the Grid, Nature, vol. 454, July 30, 2008, pg. 570-573