{"id":439398,"date":"2010-03-17T15:25:14","date_gmt":"2010-03-17T19:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/earth2tech.com\/?p=53530"},"modified":"2010-03-17T15:25:14","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T19:25:14","slug":"california%e2%80%99s-smart-meter-battle-google-vs-utilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/439398","title":{"rendered":"California\u2019s Smart Meter Battle: Google vs. Utilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"There\u2019s a battle looming in California over smart meters and energy prices. Google says the state should require its big utilities to give near real-time pricing information to every smart meter<\/a>-enabled customer by the end of next year. California\u2019s big three utilities \u2014 Pacific Gas & Electric<\/a>, Southern California Edison<\/a>, and San Diego Gas & Electric<\/a> \u2014 have raised plenty of objections<\/a> to that deadline, and the California Public Utilities Commission is holding a workshop<\/a> in San Francisco on Friday to talk about it.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The debate, which could influence smart grid policies across the country, underscores an important difference between the two things Google wants utilities to provide \u2014\u00a0energy \u201cusage\u201d data versus \u201cpricing information.\u201d Electricity usage is a real thing that can be measured in real time with magnets and wires, either by a smart meter or lots of other devices. Electricity prices, on the other hand, are contrived, during or after the fact, by a convoluted market that has to keep demand and supply perfectly balanced at all times. Delivering pricing data in real time will be challenging for smart meter networks as they’re currently being deployed. So in other words, for utilities, delivering power comes first, figuring out who pays for it (and how much) comes later.<\/p>\n

Most utility customers pay steady, regulated rates, and don\u2019t get to see these complex price fluctuations \u2014 at least, not yet. But even getting slightly more complex tiered or time-of-use prices to customers through their smart meters could be problematic for current utility networks, given that most smart meter deployments today aren\u2019t set up to handle that<\/a>. As Lee Krevat, director of smart grid initiatives at San Diego Gas & Electric, put it in an interview this week, \u201cWe didn\u2019t put in an Internet to each meter, or broadband to each meter \u2014 and \u2018real time\u2019 really implies broadband to give near real time pricing data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most smart meter networks, including those being deployed by California\u2019s big utilities, are lower-bandwidth and designed to be read every 15 minutes or hourly<\/a>, not in real time. While there are ways to get faster or more current price information to homeowners, Krevat doesn\u2019t see such a network being the best, or most cost-effective, way, to do it.<\/p>\n

After all, \u201cThe rates exist on our Web site. The rate schedule doesn\u2019t change very often,\u201d he said. \u201cDo you want to spend your bandwidth transmitting something that could be figured out at a customer end point based on their consumption data?\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, to put it another way, would utility customers support paying for the ability to see pricing data? The customers are the ones who pay for utilities\u2019 smart meter system upgrades through increased rates. That certainly differentiates the utilities\u2019 incentives from Google, which wants usage and pricing data opened to third party systems like its PowerMeter home energy management platform. Google promises PowerMeter will be free, but building a system that can provide it with data may still cost customers in one way or another.<\/p>\n

SDG&E is working with Google\u2019s PowerMeter and has about 125 customers testing it out \u2014 but right now they\u2019re using day-old energy usage information, and currently PowerMeter doesn’t deliver any real-time pricing information. Eventually, California\u2019s three big utilities plan to turn on their smart meters\u2019 home area network (HAN) connections, but they\u2019re doing a lot of testing first. Krevat said that\u2019s an important first step in designing a system that\u2019s both cheap and effective \u2014 \u201cUnderstanding the model for how the customer wants to use it is the first step,\u201d he said. \u201cThen you can decide the technical solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ted Reguly, SDG&E\u2019s smart meter program director, said customers mainly want some kind of current bill calculation, as well as some kind of pre-set alert when that monthly tally gets too high. Someday people will want to hook up smart appliances and other in-home energy controls to the smart meter via the HAN. But as SDG&E noted in its comments to the CPUC filed in March, \u201cthe Smart Meter system as currently designed requires more than HAN to provide customer access to near real time information on prices.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond these issues, it will be important to clarify what Google means by \u201cpricing information,\u201d Reguly said. Does Google mean the flat rates homeowners are scheduled to pay, or the actual prices that they end up paying after the bill is finalized? \u201cYou might think the cost of electricity is X, but it\u2019s really Y because of bill settlement two or three days later,\u201d he said \u2014 and getting the more accurate figures to customers in real time would require utilities to completely overhaul the batch processing-based back-office billing systems<\/a> they now use.<\/p>\n

Andy Tang, PG&E\u2019s smart grid chief, said during a recent energy symposium in Berkeley, Calif. that asking utilities to replace their batch-based systems with real-time systems was \u201cimpossible\u201d in such a short timeframe, at least not at costs that regulators would be willing to pass on to customers. Tang also expressed some frustration with Google\u2019s push for deadlines for delivering real-time pricing, given that the federal government is still working on standards for all the smart grid systems to make this possible, he said. As PG&E wrote in its comments to the CPUC, \u201cNo amount of cajoling or wishing by one vendor or another that it happen by an arbitrary date can change the need for development of such uniform standards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emerging Standards<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just how those standards will emerge remains to be seen. ZigBee, the wireless technology that\u2019s taken a lead in smart meter-HAN<\/a> connectivity, is working on a second iteration of its Smart Energy Profile specification for energy data that will include some pricing information, Reguly said. For commercial and industrial customers, open demand response technologies like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory\u2019s OpenADR<\/a> or EnerNOC<\/a>\u2019s PowerTalk, are expected to embed price signals as part of an automated system to turn down devices to help utilities reduce peak loads.<\/p>\n

Perhaps broadband could be the solution. The National Institute of Standards and Technology<\/a>, the federal entity setting smart grid standards, has asked the smart grid industry to comment<\/a> on whether some or all of the customer\u2019s smart grid connections should come through broadband connections independent of the smart meter. There\u2019s a long list of companies looking at selling energy monitoring gear directly to consumers<\/a>, either as stand-alone products or bundled with home broadband offerings or security systems. Google is working with utilities and smart meter maker Itron<\/a>, but is also partnering with in-home energy devices from Energy Inc. and AlertMe<\/a> with its PowerMeter.<\/p>\n

All three California utilities have asked CPUC to avoid any hard deadlines in favor of looser policy guidance. But the issue COULD comE to every state. The Federal Communications Commission\u2019s new U.S. National Broadband Plan<\/a> includes some strong words for state utility regulators<\/a> to encourage utilities to deliver real time pricing data to consumers.
\nTo wit:<\/p>\n

\u201cStates should require electric utilities to provide consumers access to, and control of, their own digital energy information, including real-time information from smart meters and historical consumption, price and bill data over the Internet. If states fail to develop reasonable policies over the next 18 months, Congress should consider national legislation to cover consumer privacy and the accessibility of energy data.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just how the CPUC decides to take up Google’s deadline \u2014 as well as how it comes to define pricing data in the process \u2014 will be closely watched topics in the smart grid industry. Stay tuned for more details later this week.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a battle looming in California over smart meters and energy prices. Google says the state should require its big utilities to give near real-time pricing information to every smart meter-enabled customer by the end of next year. California\u2019s big three utilities \u2014 Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5776,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5776"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}