Smart meters are a cornerstone of the Smart Grid, says the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2009 Smart Grid System Report.1 They provide electricity consumption measurements and time-of-use information to utilities and consumers. They also receive market signals, help coordinate consumer equipment, and adjust consumption.
Failure to widely and successfully deploy such advanced metering technologies and related services to every home will result in a widening gap between energy supply and demand. It also will undermine essential Smart Grid capabilities and, by extension, the good of the public.
On the other hand, according to Edison Electric Institute president Tom Kuhn, successful deployment of an advanced metering infrastructure requires the adoption of new communications, encryption, and semiconductor solutions in the development of a new class of highly reliable, secure, and cost-effective smart meters.2 One of the most significant challenges facing Smart Grid development is the cost, with estimates for just the electric utility advanced metering capability ranging up to $27 billion.
Another key if not more important component of the Smart Grid is the energy consumer. The challenge here has to do with the transformation of consumption habits and attitudes of consumers effectively to “choose” energy efficiency and facilitate “choice” by improving the visibility and communication of critical information.
The good news is that never before has society been so actively concerned about energy efficiency, nor has there ever been so much industry participation in the development of energy-efficient products, as well as consumer-oriented energy-management and automation products such as smart devices, Internet portals, and services alike. So, the trend and momentum is here. Yet only 6% of the 1.6 billion meters installed worldwide are smart meters with two-way communications capability.
For instance, “smart devices” can facilitate reductions or shifts in energy consumption when customers are motivated by dynamic pricing signals or other economic incentives. The flow of information such as pricing signals does not necessarily have to be through the utility-owned smart meter. Alternatively, it can be accessed via consumer Internet appliances such as a broadband router/gateway. For utilities and their customers, each method has pros and cons when it comes to information security (or privacy), grid security, interoperability between various devices, and commercial availability.
The bottom line, though, is that both techniques can work individually or in combination. Recent trials focused on gauging the effectiveness of smart appliances and devices integrated with smart meters and dynamic pricing schemes have shown promising results, achieving significant decreases in peak demand and by extension reduced cost of energy.
However, most of this preliminary work has been based on simple decision-making algorithms to effectively control the on/off states of appliances as a function of pricing signals received. It also has been based on more granular schemes such as sub-metering at the device level, where customers are empowered to make more dynamic and well-informed decisions about their energy usage. The work is still in the early stages of development, largely due to a lack of cost-effective measurement devices for consumer appliances.
Today, such devices are available. Major manufacturers are developing smart appliances, propelled not just by the federal stimulus funding plan but also by the fundamental realization that today’s consumer wants to participate and requires the visibility to do it. From the utilities’ standpoint, with such visibility, consumers can develop a better appreciation and understanding of the true cost of operating appliances and adapt their usage habits. Or, they can rely on more sophisticated applications such as Web-based services launched by Microsoft and Google to ultimately control and reduce energy consumption and associated cost, which is a win-win outcome for absolutely everyone.
The designers of these complex products need to deal with issues such as reliability, cost, and scalability. That’s why semiconductor products specialized for energy measurement are becoming key enablers not just for first-time integrators of energy measurement in appliances, but also for well-established smart-meter developers.
THE ROAD AHEAD
Even with $4 billion in stimulus funding supporting projects in 2010, deployment costs still will be a barrier for small to mid-sized utilities, considering that the increasing costs of smart-meter hardware are amplifying the historically challenging return-on-investment scenarios.
These costs are primarily due to a complex set of communications-related feature sets such as load profile storage, encryption, multiple secure two-way communications interfaces to the grid and in-home appliances, and displays as well as remote disconnect relays and additional printed-circuit boards (PCBs). Also, don’t forget about the public perception of incompetence or worse when rollouts do not go smoothly (see “Smart Meter Rollouts And Standards Stir Controversy”).
There is an additional cost associated with an inherent fear of falling short of developing sufficiently programmable, upgradable, and future-proof solutions to address still-evolving Smart Grid applications and security and interoperability standards. Addressing these concerns can drive up the cost as more memory and communications processing than is practically usable in the short term is embedded in the design just to be safe.
No one wants to conduct large-scale rollouts only to find out later that a lack of careful consideration for the evolutionary nature of the Smart Grid can shorten the product’s life cycles. Hasty rollouts also can result in premature obsolescence and the replacement of the units deployed, which would obviously add significantly to the operating cost of the utility’s deployed infrastructure.
But maybe a bigger challenge is the decreased service life and reliability of these complex electronic instruments. The higher number of components and interconnections may result in premature replacement compared to the older, simpler units of two decades back.
SEMICONDUCTOR DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
The history of the adoption of solid-state technologies in high-volume residential meters tells an interesting story about product lifetimes. It all started a little more than 10 years ago. Today, nearly 85% of the 120 million or so new meters being shipped globally are solid-state. The rest use the old mechanical Ferraris disk.
The first incarnations of mass-market solid-state meters were born out of the necessity to produce large numbers of basic kilowatt-hour meters in rapidly developing markets such as China and India during the second half of the 1990s. At that time, only a few global meter exporters had developed the manufacturing expertise and capacity to produce revenue meters in large volumes, and fewer yet engaged in technology transfer licensing agreements to developing nations for local domestic production.