While smart meters can be limited to just reporting the entire household electricity use, and thus don't need to gather information from appliance use inside the home, people should be aware that the goal of AMI is to monitor electricity use of every appliance inside your home, and possibly control it.
To quote a US Department of Energy document on AMI, it's defined as "This infrastructure includes home network systems, including communicating thermostats and other in-home controls, smart meters, communication networks from the meters to local data concentrators, back-haul communications networks to corporate data centers, meter data management systems (MDMS) and, finally, data integration into existing and new software application platforms." See page 5 of http://www.netl.doe.gov/smartgrid/referenceshelf/whitepapers/AMI%20White%20paper%20final%20021108%20%282%29%20APPROVED_2008_02_12.pdf .
Not only that, the electric utility industry is currently exploring the use of "big data" techniques to collect and sort through all the data gathered from customers' homes. One upcoming conference for the utility industry on big data techniques is described at http://utilityanalyticsweek.com/details#1AdvancedAnalytics . In its most benign form, your electric utility might constantly nag you that your refrigerator uses too much power and should be replaced or you leave too many lights on, but in a full AMI implementation they will have the capability of actually shutting down appliances in your home remotely.
As another piece of evidence, I live in Boulder, CO, which was supposed to be the first "Smart Grid" city in the nation as part of a demo project installed by the utility Xcel. The first thing they did was install smart meters and a fiber optic network reaching every customer home and business in Boulder. I wondered at the time why they needed the huge bandwidth of fiber; now I know. Fortunately, the costs overruns of installing fiber in the city killed the project (originally priced at $15 million, it went to $45 million).
Municipal utilities are minor players in the power generation industry, serving only about 13 percent of electric customers in the United States. Despite their small share of the market, municipal utilities are expected to be one of the largest drivers of smart grid investments over the next five years, according to a report released by GTM Research.
GTM Research, which conducted a survey of muni utilities for the past two years, anticipates the next wave of smart grid expenditures will be led by municipal utilities, accounting for close to $7 billion through 2017. Of those surveyed, 72 percent said smart meters are a prerequisite to the utility’s vision of a smarter grid, reported Greentech Media, the parent company of GTM Research.
Investor-owned utilities were the initial drivers of smart grid deployments, with more than 75 percent already pursuing grid modernization initiatives, including advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and distribution automation. These investor-owned utilities often took a learn by doing approach that resulted in disparate networks and a fragmented vendor supply chain, GTM said.
As a result, integrating these moving parts, such as legacy hardware and networks, will be the crux for vendors hoping to capture business from municipal utilities that plan to upgrade.
Municipal utilities, which typically have much smaller budgets and customer base than investor-owned utilities, also will need smart grid tech that’s lower cost than what’s currently available.
Photo: Flickr user eli francis, CC 2.0
Related:
