Instrument & Interconnect
The industry is clearly in the instrument & interconnect phase of deployment and has been in various spits and spurts since 2008. We have seen an increased focus starting in early 2011. We believe this is being driven by two factors, first many of the Smart Grid Grants received in 2009 have build out commitments that must be met of for the utilities to retain their grant funds. Second, progressive utilities have come to realize that there is not going to be any spectrum allocated by the FCC for smart grid and have made the decision to think creatively and realistically about their real bandwidth and throughput requirements.
What has been deployed so far are millions of Smart Meters operating primarily on networks consisting of mesh like protocols operating in the unlicensed spectrum space in the ISM band, talking to collector points strategically located throughout their operating territories. Today, the stubble is how to aggregate the data from the collector points and feed the data securely into the Utilities data center. We have managed in the last three years to go from reading meters once a month to reading millions of meter an average of 3000 times per month, literally creating an avalanche of data that shows up every 15 minutes at the utility billing and operations centers. This data, in such granularity, will provide huge insight into the utility networks load and has the potential, properly managed, to transform the utility industry. But for now, the industry is basically just reading a lot of meters more accurately than ever, more frequently than ever, and beginning to "mine" this data. The full potential value of the automated meter data will evolve as the industry entera into the automate and transact phase.
While the initial deployment of the Smart Grid has been dominated by the deployment of Smart Meters, the industry is continuing to Instrument and Interconnect with the planning and implementation of Distribution Automation (DA) and Demand Response (DR) technologies. These technologies while not complex are not yet being deployed as rapidly as the Smart Meters. DA/DR technologies are rapidly evolving and when fully deployed will provide utilities with the ability to pro-actively monitor and manage their distribution networks and the result will be more reliable, more efficiently operated networks.
In an upcoming post I will talk about the networks and the spectrum available, that are being used to deploy the evolving DA/DR devices.
Marc
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