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Then and Now: Current Trends for HAN Integration Reveal Slow (But Promising) Growth
By Mark Knight (KEMA) and Matthew Spaur (Itron)
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This article recalls another article written over six years ago by one of the authors while working for a start-up company developing residential gateway applications. That article centered on ways that residential gateways could be used for distributed load curtailment. Six years ago, this was a promising technology but without any wide-scale adoption. This current article looks at some of the expectations from early 2002 and compares them to what is happening today. In that previous article, it was said that,
"while load curtailment has been around for many years, price-responsive demand programs are growing in popularity. Yet for both of these there is a huge untapped market just waiting for the right cost benefit model."
Six years later and still today we are seeing more attempts to manage load both in terms of load reduction and load shifting through time of use (TOU) rates and smart meters coupled with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) that are helping to make this possible. The previous article also stated that
"price responsive demand is an attempt to reduce price through a reduction in load. While it may also benefit reliability, this is not the motivation.”
That last sentence is worth a whole discussion of its own and that will be addressed in a future article, but the previous article also went on to state that
"A large customer with localized load can help balance local demand with supply. However, benefits on a wider scale are limited by transmission and distribution system capacity. The capacity of the network is constrained by engineering limits. Typical load curtailment is a bit like a doctor treating a patient with high blood pressure and clogged arteries by reducing blood pressure in one arm and hoping it will provide the necessary benefit to the rest of the body. What is really needed is the ability to aggregate multiple distributed loads by allowing each metered load sink to be a member of more than one load group. This requires load to be situated across the network for optimal benefits...The ability to aggregate multiple loads would provide the capability to provide a flexible load reduction mechanism that could be used to support load curtailment and price-responsive demand."
At the time that the previous article was written, the promise seemed great, but the realization of these schemes has been slow to materialize. In recent years, EPAct 2005, California, Italy, and Ontario are among the factors that have helped to make these possibilities more of a reality through widespread implementation of interval metering of residential customers.
Interval metering through smart meters is being implemented, among other reasons, to support TOU rates. But, when coupled with an ability to integrate with home area networks (HANs) and smart appliances, the dream of distributed load management is much closer to being a reality.
The 2002 article wrote that
"Grouping residential and small commercial loads both regionally and locally could allow the emulation of current curtailment programs. It would also have the capability to provide distributed load curtailment by reducing load that has been aggregated from geographically dispersed locations... if enough of these customers had interval metering with automated meter reading (AMR), their load could be aggregated to a sufficient level."
This is the type of service being provided by EnerNOC, Comverge, and others for commercial customers where load reductions are bid into the market to offset increased generation requirements. Of course, without smart appliances, the ability to influence reductions in residential customer load depends on voluntary participation or the ability to cycle air conditioners, pool pumps, or other devices that consume high loads. Now, however, smart appliances are becoming a reality. Much research has been done on the adoption and use of these devices for load reduction when coupled with TOU rates, such as the Woodbridge project by Whirlpool in 2003-2006.
Underlining the benefits of load reduction, the Energy Action Plan adopted by the state's energy agencies in California places conservation and energy efficiency first in the loading order of energy resources because they are the least expensive and most environmentally protective resources. This is described in a Staff Report by the California Energy Commission to which KEMA provided input.
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Itron's Experience
Going back to 2002, the startup became Lanthorn Technlologies after the author left the company. Itron, a leading supplier of metering-related solutions to utilities, recognized a good deal of promise in the technology and invested significantly in the company between 2002 and 2004. Although Lanthorn went out of business in 2004, Itron has continued to pursue the promise of this technology. We are seeing increasing interest in home area networking and smart appliances today, with smart meters as the gateway to the home.
The trend towards balancing load through demand response is one factor that led Itron to develop OpenWay®, their AMI solution for electricity and natural gas. Like many in the industry, Itron views AMI as a combination of smart meters and two-way communication networks that offers all the operational efficiency of AMR plus pervasive demand response and energy management along with support for a Smart Grid.
In developing OpenWay, Itron took a radical departure from their existing AMR solutions. They decided that OpenWay would be built on open standards, with a different type of network communications architecture. These decisions meant that, at least initially, OpenWay would not offer a migration path from existing Itron AMR solutions to the new AMI platform. The market was asking for an AMI solution built around a two-way communication network based on open standards. That is what Itron delivered for AMI.
Itron decided to support residential demand response by including ZigBee® open standard wireless networking in every OpenWay CENTRON®. ZigBee is the only global wireless communications standard offering easy to use low-power, secure, reliable, self-forming, and self-healing mesh networks. With a ZigBee link reaching into the home, utilities can send price signals directly to devices. Those devices can then respond to the signal according to the settings and preferences programmed by their owners.
Itron chose this approach, in part, to help foster a marketplace for innovation in smart energy devices. Utilities and their customers want a choice when selecting energy devices. To help start this new marketplace for energy devices, Itron formed a strategic, but non-exclusive, partnership with Comverge to offer programmable communicating thermostats that can deliver on the promise of residential demand response.
Technologies like ZigBee provide the basis for HANs, which allow multiple devices in the home to communicate and work in concert to automate energy management without sacrificing comfort or convenience. For instance, a utility price signal can travel from a meter into the home through a ZigBee link. Inside the home, a thermostat or in-home gateway receives that signal and passes it along to other appropriate devices to respond.
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Interoperability & Demand Response
The OpenHAN industry group has worked to develop a specification of what a HAN should offer in terms of capabilities and interoperability. Itron actively participates in the OpenHAN work, as part of their dedication to open standards for OpenWay.
Southern California Edison (SCE) validated the OpenWay solution by selecting it to automate over five million meters throughout their service territory. In truth, SCE’s vision and specifications for an AMI system informed much of the OpenWay design. SCE has also been instrumental in guiding the OpenHAN effort to define what a home-area network should deliver for energy management.
A large part of SCE’s business case for deploying an AMI system across its Southern California service area rests on the benefits of residential demand response. SCE plans to derive 1,000 MW of new demand response capacity from the utility’s AMI deployment. That level of demand response will help SCE manage peak energy demand much more effectively. Better management means better system reliability, less need for new peaking power plants, and less need to buy expensive peak power on the open market.
Demand response doesn’t take place solely in the home, however. The entire energy delivery system needs to support demand response from sending price signals to measurement and verification of demand reductions to billing calculations based on demand response programs. This pervasive impact of demand response programs is another reason that Itron built OpenWay on open standards. Those standards provide easy integration between new AMI technology and existing utility infrastructure such as CIS and billing systems. Aside from ZigBee, other standards such as C12.19, C12.22, TCP/IP, Web Services, and XML all play a role in uniting the energy delivery system into a responsive network with two-way communications. Itron and OpenWay support all of these standards and more.
There are also many other factors all converging to make HANs attractive propositions in addition to the development of standards and emerging new technologies. There is the increased availability of broadband access (including through the power line), the convergence of other services, e.g. cable, phone, and internet, and a much greater availability and public awareness of home networking thanks to in-home technology such as wireless networking, networked printers, and network storage, all of which many of us already have in our homes.
Therefore, today we are much closer to being able to realize the benefits of distributed load control and HAN is generating more and more interest on the residential side. For commercial and industrial customers we have also seen the establishment of commercial organizations such as EnerNOC, who sell “negawatts” into the system, and Comverge with their “smart megawatts” to reduce generation and reduce harmful emissions. Six years on, the future is here today.
Matthew Spaur works in business development for Itron, focusing on advanced metering and Smart Grid applications. In his four years at Itron he's also worked in software marketing and corporate marketing. He holds a masters from Eastern Washington University and previously spent 11 years at Microsoft in a variety of roles.
Contact the author at mark.knight@kema.com.
References:
(1) Load Curtailment, Mark Knight, Energy Markets, February 2002.
(2) Implementing California’s Loading Order For Electricity Resources, CEC, July 2005
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Download the April 2008 Issue
Use the link below to download the PDF of the full issue of the April 2008 Automation Insight for the complete print versions of the articles.
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[download] Automation Insight - April 2008 (.pdf 157 kb)
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