Good summary, Charlie. You might also be interested in what is happening in our city.
In Stratford, Ontario, (pop.32.000) the local electrical utility, Festival Hydro, built a citywide Wi-Fi system in 2010 for their smart meter data backhaul. In 2008, the Province of Ontario mandated all utilities to go to smart meters to encourage off-peak usage, energy conservation, and carbon reduction. (And on/off peak pricing.)
Rather than run new wiring to all 20,000 customers, or single-purpose cellphone widgets, City Hall opted for the new 802.11n Wi-Fi. (The City is sole shareholder of the utility corporation.)
So Festival Hydro expanded their 40km of optical fibre to a 70-km loop, built the Wi-Fi mesh over it with repeaters and about 200 access points to the fibre. Voila, contiguous, ubiquitous, citywide Wi-Fi wherever there are electricity meters.
Now, hourly smart meter data is compiled and differentiated on customers' monthly bills as on-peak, off-peak and shoulder so they can see their costs and the value of shifting their usage away from peak load periods. And because the smart meter data is backhauled daily, they can also check their own hour-by-hour data online for a closer look at their usage patterns and costs.
The fibre/Wi-fi system was built in 6 months and those broadband assets were rolled into a new city-owned company, Rhyzome Networks, to allow more latitude in developing other uses for the system. So local telco companies are starting to re-sell the fibre and Wi-Fi capacity. And tech companies like Toshiba, Cisco, RIM and Mutualink, and research universities like Clemson, Waterloo and Western, are partnering with the city to develop, prove, scale and commercialize technologies on the system.
The smart meter and fibre/Wi-Fi system is also the cornerstone of Stratford's emergence as one of the world's "Top7 Intelligent Communities" by New York's Intelligent Community Forum think tank.
If you'd like to see more about the build, Motorola did a mini-documentary to showcase the project: http://www.youtube.com/user/motorolapublicsafety
And we have an ICF Committee blog at http://stratfordsmartcity.ca
Cheers,
David Hicks
“The Morning Briefing” is SmartPlanet’s daily roundup of must-reads from the web. This morning we’re reading about smart meter installation.
1.) Will smart meters benefit consumers? Smart meters can perform various functions, from remote meter-reading to facilitating time-of-use tariffs to the consumer.
2.) ICC lets ComEd delay smart meters until 2015. The Illinois Commerce Commission on Wednesday approved ComEd’s request to delay the installation of smart meters until 2015 but said it will revisit the issue in April when the utility is scheduled to file a progress report on the program.
3.) A lot of people don’t want their electric meters ’smart’. Seven years after legislators passed a law encouraging the use of “smart” electricity meters across Texas, enthusiasm about the initiative is waning amid complaints about the meters being installed against the wishes of some homeowners.
4.) Price of saying no to smart meters could go up. Customers of Southern California Edison and other public utilities could see higher bills in the coming months if they continue to block smart meter installations at their homes.
5.) Smart meter opt-out policies explained. During the past two decades, roughly 300 million electric and gas meters on customer premises have been equipped with radios to transmit meter readings to remote locations without harming a single consumer.
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