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Did You Hear?
Pertinent Market News Over the Last Month
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At Autovation 2008, held in Atlanta Sept. 7-10, Rob Wilhite, KEMA’s Senior Vice President, Intelligent Networks and Communications, was one of three distinguished recipients of Utilimetrics’ Presidents Award. In 2007, Utilimetrics instituted the President’s Award as a special recognition from the association president to a member volunteer. This award is presented as a sign of the association’s appreciation for the significant accomplishments and sacrifice of time given by the volunteer. Rob was appointed chair of the Education Committee in 2007. In presenting the award to Rob, Utilimetrics President Stephen Carrico noted that, "Under Rob’s guidance the pre and post-symposium courses have thrived, Webinar and seminar attendance has increased, and we are exploring new ways of sharing our body of knowledge through resources such as online exchanges, blogs and podcasts. Rob’s enthusiasm has energized the committee members and I’m very excited to see what they will offer next."
American Electric Power, Consumers Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Reliant Energy, Sempra, and Southern California Edison are working with the ZigBee(R) Alliance and the HomePlug(R) Powerline Alliance to develop a common application layer integrated solution for AMI and HAN. Using the robust capabilities of the ZigBee Smart Energy public application profile as a baseline, the three groups will expand the application layer and enable it to run on HomePlug technology, providing utilities with both wireless and wired HAN industry standards to select from when implementing new AMI programs. "This initiative will provide seamless application integration using ZigBee or HomePlug devices, providing the flexibility utilities need when implementing AMI and smart metering programs," said Paul De Martini, vice president at Southern California Edison. "Mainstream market adoption of a common technology accelerates our ability to empower our customers to manage their energy usage."
Itron Inc. and SmartSynch announced that they have extended their existing partnership to include delivery of cellular communications for AMI solutions into the Open Way® CENTRON® meter by Itron. OpenWay is an AMI solution that utilizes smart electricity meters and two-way communication networks between the utility and each meter. OpenWay delivers operational efficiency, empowers all customers to participate in energy management and conservation, and supports smart energy transmission and distribution grids. Inclusion of SmartSynch's IP-enabled public wireless technology into Itron OpenWay CENTRON meters allows Itron to propose an AMI solution to utilities that provides communication to 100% of the targeted meters, as was recently the case with DTE Energy and its decision to automate 3.3 million electric and natural gas meters using OpenWay technology.
Certicom Corp. announced that Daintree Networks, a provider of design verification and operational support tools for wireless embedded networks, has licensed Certicom's Security Builder® MCE™ and Security Builder® Crypto™ products in order to bring to market secure, low cost and low bandwidth ZigBee Smart Energy networking products. Under terms of the licensing agreement, Daintree will forge Certicom's Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) security into its Sensor Network Analyzer (SNA) to provide the industry's most comprehensive and secure solution for testing, analysis and commissioning of IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee systems. Daintree's standards-based analyzer incorporates the latest ZigBee specifications to help ensure compliance and interoperability of wireless smart metering devices and networks.
Trilliant of Redwood City, California, a privately-owned, 23 year old supplier of hardware, software and services and intelligent networks that support the Smart Grid announced that it has closed a $40 million equity investment led by an affiliate of MissionPoint Capital Partners, also including zouk ventures, the proceeds of which would be used to accelerate its growth and market expansion worldwide.
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Download the October 2008 Issue
Use the link below to download the PDF of the full issue of the October 2008 Automation Insight for the complete print versions of the articles.
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[download] Automation Insight - October 2008 (.pdf 84 kb)
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