May 18th, 2009
ZigBee-Powered Smart Grids: Coming To A Home Near You?
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You can’t read a green-focused blog or periodical these days without seeing something about smart grids. Smart transmission grids from wind farms to cities, smart distribution grids from our local utilities, or even smart energy networks at home. The advertised benefits are many - the ability to move renewable energy from remote sources to urban areas, less energy waste in transmission, and the ability of utilities to optimize energy consumption across their grids all the way down to (and into) your home. To make this last leg work, utilities will need to be able to talk to your appliances, climate control systems, and other home energy devices in order to manage their energy production in a smart and low-carbon way. (For an entertaining and informative if optimistic description of how this might work some day, check out Chapter Ten of Thomas Friedman’s great book Hot, Flat and Crowded).
Enter ZigBee, a relatively new wireless technology that is a frontrunner in the race to network and control all of your home environmental systems. Now, if you’re like me, your first question might be whether we really need another wireless technology. As if WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, CDMA, GSM, and the many other protocols out there aren’t enough already! But ZigBee has several major attributes that DO make it an important piece of the puzzle. The ZigBee protocol is optimized to pass relatively small amounts of data between devices efficiently - not great for streaming real-time voice conversations or music, but perfect for sending a thermostat setpoint or refrigerator temperature to the smart meter outside your home. The key benefits are that ZigBee transmitters are very simple and inexpensive to build AND they require very little power. They cost fractions of what a Bluetooth connection would cost, and can be powered for months or years on the smallest of batteries. This is the key advantage - they can be integrated into almost any point of home energy use (switches, outlets, lights, appliances) without requiring a significant power source and without driving up the price.
A home full of ZigBee-networked devices could be the termination point for the developing smart grid. All of your home energy users would be networked to a centralized controller or your PC, and you could see and change energy usage throughout your home from your office or cell phone. You could program lights and outlets to turn off if a room is unoccupied, or if electricity prices increased during a hot day. You could turn on your heating system and lights before arriving home on a cold winter’s night. And your utility could shut down or delay certain systems (with your pre-approval, of course) if it faced a day of peak demand across your local electricity grid.
So, if you consider yourself an early adopter of green technology, can you get your hands on any worthwhile ZigBee-powered devices? Unfortunately, there aren’t that many consumer-oriented ZigBee products available yet, but that’s likely to change. Utilities are already beginning to install ZigBee-enabled smart electricity meters on homes and apartments throughout the country, so expect to see products that communicate with them soon. Keep your eyes open for products from these leading ZigBee-related companies:
- Tendril. Tendril is a Boulder-based smart grid company that is launching a full line of residential products, including the Vantage Internet portal, the Insight home energy monitor, the Set Point thermostat and Volt wall outlets. They’re not available at retail yet, but they might be available through your utility if they happen to have a smart grid pilot program.
- Cisco Systems. Cisco is the world’s largest networking hardware company, and just today they announced the outlines of their plans to enter the smart grid market. They stated the intention to enter the residential market without mentioning any specific plans. But Cisco’s successful forays into the small business and residential networking markets after initially focusing on corporate markets (via big steps like acquiring Linksys) suggests they’ll launch major initiatives soon.
- Greenbox. Greenbox will provide a web-based solution that allows you to manage your home’s energy usage and environmental footprint from one place.
- GE and other major appliance manufacturers. The major electronics companies haven’t announced many residential smart grid plans yet, but they’re clearly a big piece of the overall puzzle. Look for ZigBee in a refrigerator or washing machine near you soon.
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