Interoperability is not anywhere near as sexy a topic as the huge chunks of venture capital being pumped into solar energy startups like
Nanosolar and
Avasolar, but the standards that will allow homes, offices and the equipment inside them to interact intelligently with the power grid will have as much impact on our environment’s future as any solar panels that sit on their roofs. Much of the technology needed to let buildings manage their energy consumption by turning non-essential equipment off during peak load conditions, selling surplus electricity from their solar panels back to the grid, and even using electric vehicle batteries as distributed peak load management systems is already available. The challenge until now has been reducing system costs and getting parts of the solution from different manufacturers to talk to one another. This may begin to change with the HomePlug Powerline Alliance’s recent
announcement that it’s working with the Zigbee Alliance and several major utilities to develop a common application layer that will allow wired and wireless networks to operate as a unified energy management network. If this open standard manages to catch on it could help dramatically accelerate the deployment of smart buildings, distributed power generation systems, and the appliances that will communicate with them.
If you have any doubt about what interoperability can do for the mass-development of a technology, consider the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard. Thanks to the cooperation and competition made possible by 802.11 open standards, it took less than a decade for chip and equipment manufacturers to slash the cost of wireless data equipment by an order of magnitude while boosting its data capacity by nearly a factor of 100. Providing a common communication protocol for energy management could have a similar effect and allow semiconductor makers to produce high-volume chip sets that can be inexpensively integrated into smart power meters, solar inverters, lighting systems, thermostats, water heaters and other devices that use or produce large amounts of energy.
It’s not hard to imagine a day when your home thermostat also serves as a central control console that manages your appliances and HVAC system as well as any solar panels or co-generation equipment you might happen to have. Accessing the thermostat via a wireless link and a secure browser interface, you would be able to program it to turn on your dishwasher or dryer only when the power grid was advertising off-peak electricity rates. The same console could also serve as a peak load manager, able to turn off your air conditioner, water heater, or pool pump for short periods to help reduce potentially-crippling peak demand spikes. If the folks at the HomePlug and Zigbee alliances are smart, they’ll also include hooks that allow for future developments like
vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and co-generation systems to interact with the building they are serving as well as the grid at large. Thanks to the economies of scale and open markets that they create, the common protocols emerging from this venture may be one of the key elements that finally helps smart buildings and smart power grids realize their potential for building a greener future.
Comments? Questions? Other important eco-protocols I should know about? Write me at
lhg at en-genius dot net, or post your comments on our blog.
