Make or break standards for home energy management

1

By Chet Geschickter

The home energy management market faces many challenges. In this article, analyst and HEM expert Chet Geschickter explains how the lack of two key standards is blocking progress. He also advises both utilities and vendors to get involved in closing these gaps, for the good of all. – Jesse Berst

My previous article presented a business case for home energy management technology to avoid building additional natural gas-fired peaking plants. In this article, I'll explain the two standards issues that must be solved to make that business case possible.

Needed: Features for a mass market

 The large number of homes needed for the business case to work – around 100,000 – points to the need for mass-market adoption.  Therefore, HEM products must be:

·         Inexpensive

·         Attractive and easy to use (working as advertised “out of the box”)

·         Self-installing and auto-configuring

·         Work without interfering with the ever-growing assortment of wireless home networks and devices

Consumer choice also factors heavily.  A healthy and interoperable ecosystem of products is vital.  Such an ecosystem provides consumers with opportunities to choose between components from different vendors with different price-points, form-factors and functionality. But they can make that choice with the assurance that everything will work as a cohesive system. 

On the utility side, home energy management systems also need to interoperate with utility energy management systems such as demand management, meter data management (MDM) systems, and advanced metering infrastructure.  This makes it possible to reduce peak consumption spikes by influencing energy consumption at thousands of households in a coordinated fashion.

The two key challenges

This all nets out to two pressing standards challenges:

Tested, plug-and-play interoperability

Early tests (by Oncor and others) of “standards compliant” products uncovered interoperability problems between vendors.  Examples included proprietary extensions to incomplete specifications and devices that kicked components from other vendors off the network.  Products need to be put through interoperability testing and certification to ensure they work together.  Today, the Z-Wave home automation standard holds an edge in this area. The rival ZigBee Alliance is working hard to close the gap.

Standards for Data-Sharing

ZigBee for the home and CIM (common information model) for utilities have different data structures.  At the moment, custom system integration is needed to bridge between utility enterprise and home energy management systems.  The IEC and the ZigBee Alliance must work collaboratively to harmonize the two standards.     

A lot of standards work remains to be done.  It is in the best interests of the utility industry to get involved in the process. A robust, interoperable marketplace will encourage consumers to adopt home energy tools. And it will make it easier to get the home energy management business case to work.

Chet Geschickter is a smart grid analyst with GTM Research and the author of a recent report on Smart Grid HAN.

You might also be interested in ...

Finally, some progress on a home energy management standard

Smart grid home area networks: news and insights