Enabling the Smart, Connected Home – SPGTC 2011
May 12, 2011, Smart Power Grid Technical Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Kishore Maghnani from Marvell talked about the other side of the smart grid, the user side of the meter. Currently, majority of people who have smart meters do not check for the information available at the utility’s site.
Lifestyle changes are being driven by a advances in technology in many areas including screenings, devices, and the ability to deliver services. People interact across all of these areas and soon will be able to perform similar activities with their electrical appliances. This interaction is important to realize the goals of the smart grid, to save energy and reduce costs to consumers.
Energy use in homes in the United States is split with 46 percent for HVAC, 14 percent for water heaters, 13 percent for appliances, 12 percent for lighting, 4 percent for electronics, and the balance for other uses. Electricity use, excluding pool pumps and spas, tends to be concentrated in the larger “white goods” appliances like refrigerator, washing machine, clothes dryer, freezer, and dishwasher. In commercial buildings, lighting accounts for 30 percent of total electricity use, as long as you’re not a server farm that can consume millions of megawatts for electricity for power and air-conditioning.
Some of the reasons for increased interest in consumption patterns and energy sinks are related to the need to just in time demand response and the necessary infrastructure resources needed to meet peak requirements. By controlling loads and time-shifting energy use to non-peak hours, utilities can reduce the need for total energy generation by thousands of kilowatt hours. This reduction is significant since power generation facilities cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to develop.
When utilities can receive information on the price and costs of energy, projected and actual loading, and other important content about energy management when they deliver the power, they can recognize significant energy savings. The problem is that even smart appliances require some type of provisioning and set up which consumers don’t do very well or very often. The smart meters all have a Zigbee wireless interface built-in, but these interfaces are not activated in most installations.
Appliances will communicate with the meters through Zigbee or a WiFi gateway and the next generation appliances will be able to realize significant energy savings, ease of use, greater amounts of automation, and even remote diagnostics. Currently, GE appliances have a Zigbee main interface and a WiFi backup while LG uses a WiFi is the main connection plus Zigbee to the meter. All of these appliances and the many others that will soon follow will require lots of middleware and top-level apps so users can access and act upon the available data.
An example of the currently available smart product is choosing to choose a WiFi thermostat that anyone can buy at Home Depot. This thermostat can identify a need for new filters and will even link you to a 3M site for purchases. This thermostat not only helps to manage energy use, but also provides a platform for ancillary services and diagnostics.
Some drivers for movement to the Smart home include energy savings, convenience, the ability to provide remote diagnostics, and enablement of additional services. Some of the third-party services will interact with other data sources and will create a collection of smart energy services which may come from the utilities, broadband suppliers, or appliance OEMs.
For smart appliances to become truly viable, the solutions they provide must not add up to too large an increase in prices even though they will need a CPU, networking hardware, memory, and software on top of the existing sheet metal and motors. These new appliances must be easy to install and be capable of software upgrades to add new functions in the future. The current lack of standards and interoperability is a major challenge to be overcome, but once the industry crosses these barriers there will be wide availability of smart appliances.
Overall solutions also require software platforms to simplify and ease provisioning and enable other services. House appliance data should be accessible through the Internet via any available platform. The ecosystem must include the various OEMs, utility service providers, standard bodies, component manufacturers, and a software development community to make the various apps and user interfaces. The middleware for communications and protocols will probably come from the component manufacturers while third-party or customer developed software will take care of the top-level functions such as pricing, metering, billing, etc.
Older appliances will not have smart interfaces built-in. Enterprising manufacturers will produce indication modules to interface smart meter in the older appliances to provide partial intelligence to the existing appliances. These smart outlets could measure power, remote control, demand and response all through WiFi connectivity.
While appliances are getting the most attention, lighting still consumes significant percentage of home energy. The smart outlets can be used on existing lighting and new lights can be designed as retrofits into existing sockets to include integrated smart electronics to manage power. These new lights will probably use LEDs as the light source just because of their very high energy efficiency, and the control ICs will make them back compatible to dimmable incandescent lights.
