No Hot Air

Smart Grid Savings

Before we discovered Shale Gas,  No Hot Air was very interested in Smart Metering.

We want to help business users control their costs. One way is to avoid long term prices and their associated risk of paying through the nose, or through the teeth of shark consultants,  for the sake of a fixed price.

We also wanted to point out the bleeding obvious that the cheapest energy of all, is the energy not used.  Why obsess about a few decimal points per kWh on price, when the lowest hanging fruit is wasted energy?  So, one thing that hasn't changed since April 2008 is that the best savings are from combined smart metering and index prices.

We haven't done a Smart Meter story for a while.  From a UK viewpoint the continual bickering, pointless consultation upon pointless consultation and general inablility to make a decision are symptomatic of all that's wrong in UK energy.  If half the energy wasted on deciding the reasons for one of many organisations (DTI,DECC, Ofgem, National Grid, Suppliers, Manufacturers) to avoid making a decision were instead spent on implementation....

We'll leave the depressing news to www.smartmeters.com:

UK SmartMeter Rollout – Not Likely This year or The Next or the Next.....

The UK government is still procrastinating on Smartmeters, and UK energy firms are wasting millions of pounds in dumb pre-pay meter rollouts.

The UK Government announced on the 11th of May 2009, the rollout of 46 Million Smart Utility Meters, this was hailed the revolution of the 21st Century. SmartMeters were the answer to see the end of the highly controversial Estimated Billing, a sigh of relief must have been heard across the entire UK population.

Estimated billing, you either pay too much, therefore giving the utility an interest free loan;  or you pay not enough, only then to be hit with a massive shortfall and demands for payment

Positive news of the potential which we could achieve, or negative news in how much we squander in time wasting comes from the NY Times:

A smart grid pilot project in Fayetteville, N.C., has resulted in an initial 20 percent decline in average electricity consumption

A smart grid is the next iteration of smart meters in that everything down to plug level is just another node on a wireless network.  The chance of the UK having a smart grid anytime before 2050 are slim to none judging from the Smart Metering Fiasco. Still, we can dream....

Consert attached controllers on hot water heaters, air conditioners and pool pumps and then let customers go online and set targets for their monthly electricity bill. Smart meters and a wireless communications system provide real-time electricity consumption data to allow the utility to cycle appliances on and off to achieve the savings and help it manage peak demand.

One of the problems of the UK system where financial institutions have sliced and diced every part of the energy chain into miniscule pieces (generator, upstream, terminal operator,national transmission, local network, meter provider, meter operator, data provider, data comms provider, emergency service provider, supplier, billing contractor, energy consultant etc) is that getting a network of people like that to work together makes linking plugs together childs play, especially with the Ofgem mantra of competition solves everything. One of the really pointless discussions is obsession with costs. Any one of the above actors worries about their selfish costs of literally pennies per user per year.But the opportunity costs of not acting are far higher for both energy users (all of us) and the planet (that's all of us too!).

But the crazy thing is that a smart grid is far cheaper overall:

The Consert system, which is based on IBM software, would allow the Fayetteville Public Works Commission to selectively reduce demand among its 80,000 customers without having to, say, shut off everyone’s air conditioners at the same time.

Utilities typically spend hundreds of millions of dollars building so-called peaking power plants that provide electricity when demand spikes, and otherwise sit idle for most of the year.

Keith Lynch, an executive at the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, said the utility hopes the Consert system will help it to cut such capital costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“We’re looking at building a new gas-fired generation plant, but this solution would mitigate the need to build the size power plant that we had anticipated,” he said.

 

New light on new light

Regular readers know that we have a particular issue with  the <5% of people who have a particular issue with CFL lighting.  Stirred up by journalists who look for an issue that should be ignored where it even exists, a few saddoes have been convinced that actually making the break from incandescent lighting (circa 1880) to to CFL lights (circa 1998) is the death of free choice and civilisation as we know it.

We have a particular issue with those journalists too lazy to point out that CFL is so 1998, and that today's choice is between incandescent and LED.

News from Japan that LEDs are nearing mainstream:

Panasonic has launched a new household LED lightbulb in Japan that it says lasts 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.
The screw-in bulbs are part of the EverLed line, and they're scheduled to hit stores in Japan on October 21, with monthly production at 50,000 units. No changes to lighting equipment used for incandescents are required.
If used an average of five and a half hours per day, the new bulbs can last up to 19 years, according to Panasonic. That's 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.
The bulbs use only an eighth the power of incandescents. That means a 60-watt-equivalent LED bulb would cost only 300 yen (about $3) a year instead of 2,380 yen ($25.80)--a significant savings over a lifetime.

The 60 watt replacement is advertised as having a 6.9 watt consumption.  Early adopters in Japan can expect to pay 40,000 yen or $40.  But as there are many early adopters out there with $4000 Panasonic plasma screens, we're pretty sure that the light bulbs will be <10% of today's price  within five years.

Let's do some math here.  If we can save 87% of the 25% of home energy bills spent on illumination that adds up to

a) a whole lot

b) a 20% total drop in electricity demand

c) all nuclear generation.  Plus a further 15% of coal fired generation.  Or half of all coal fired generation, we get to keep the nukes and meet 2020 targets years early

d) all of the above

The answer is d of course.  But what's the more important story to get out to the British Public?  Good news (all of the above) or journalists catering to  old ideas instead of creating new ones?

Almost unreal, but coming soon

We pointed out just last week that moaning about CFL lighting is only a short term pleasure for those who can think disaster instead of opportunity at the end of the Edisonian, incandescent age, because LED and more interestingly OLED lighting is the way forward.

Article today in the NY Times highlights as it were, the attraction of OLED not only for industry, but for designers:

But unlike LEDs, which provide points of light like standard incandescent bulbs, OLEDs create uniform, diffuse light across ultrathin sheets of material that eventually can even be made to be flexible.Ingo Maurer...If you make a wall divider with OLED panels, it can be extremely decorative. I would combine it with point light sources,” he said.

Other designers have thought about putting them in ceiling tiles or in Venetian blinds, so that after dusk a room looks as if sunshine is still streaming in.

And the roll out of the flexible lights isn't so far away:

Within a year, manufacturers expect to sell the first OLED sheets that one day will illuminate large residential and commercial spaces...Because OLED panels are just 0.07 of an inch thick and give off virtually no heat when lighted, one day architects will no longer need to leave space in ceilings for deep lighting fixtures, just as homeowners do not need a deep armoire for their television now that flat-panel TVs are common.

The new technology is being developed by major lighting companies like G.E., Konica Minolta, Osram Sylvania, Philips and Universal Display...G.E. is developing a roll-to-roll manufacturing process, similar to the way photo film and food packaging are created; it expects to offer OLED lighting sheets as early as the end of next year.

This will be a fascinating concept that is going to accelerate the structural  changes of declining energy consumption but in ways that aren't just to do with energy economics.

OLED lighting is almost unreal,” said Hannes Koch, a founder of rAndom International in London, a product design firm. “It will change the quality of light in public and private spaces

Well, we think it's sexy.

 Our favourite ever US President, albeit from a very short list,  talks about increased rules for lighting efficiency:

Now I know light bulbs may not seem sexy,” Mr. Obama said, “but this simple action holds enormous promise because 7 percent of all the energy consumed in America is used to light our homes and our businesses.”

The new rule, scheduled to take effect in 2012, will cut the amount of electricity used by affected lamps by 15 to 25 percent

We believe this will be the biggest efficiency savings from any appliance standard ever,” said Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, an advocacy organization.

Putting in something as un-sexy as lower energy bulbs, does more than only annoy Daily Mail readers, something we find valuable in itself. It saves money obviously, and carbon. But reducing electricity use for lighting, which we predict will be far deeper and faster than most realise, will also have an impact across the electricity generation sector, which will put further downward pressure on gas prices.

How far will lighting spend drop?  By 2020, we think there is promise through any number of research avenues to make new lighting technology that makes energy use so cheap as to possibly not be worth the effort of metering it.  An example of how wide the research net has been pushed, is how it's not just about engineers or physicists but also even chemists:

A single molecule that reliably emits white light could speed the development of low-energy LEDs for the next generation of light sources and displays, say chemists

 

More than meters get smart

We like to approach everything from a different and sometimes disruptive perspective: energy buying, energy "risk", TPIs, energy "shortage" etc. And although we love Smart Meters, and have been a fan of SM from day one: Aren't we forgetting that it will all be about what SM can do despite (some) people getting hung up on arcana like technology and data flows?

End users are mostly content to get accurate monthly reads. If they can get half hourly reads, that's good too. Worrying about how reads are delivered is akin to sitting in a restaurant obsessing about what is happening in the kitchen. Most people would rather not know- their judgment of success depends on the eating experience, not the recipe or the ingredients or how skillful the chef is. As vital as those things are to delivery, end users don't generally find them important. And so with data. Just do it. Do you know how to program computers? Probably not.But you're reading this.

We have been saying for a while that the intersection between phone and metering will fracture. And why not? Phones themselves now include fixed and mobile while blurring the difference between computing and television while disrupting old models of content delivery. The visual display of energy metering information may not be as compelling as seeing a movie, but the mechanics behind delivery  isn't that much different.

The next generation of wireless technology will give rise to the internet of things, where everything has an IP address. Pulses of electrons and molecules in energy flowing through utilities will simply be one more type of digital information. But wireless or smart metering only refers to the medium - the important thing is the message. How food gets from field to factory to kitchen to plate is mere detail, even most of the time to the gourmet.

An example is to compare the  Verizon Hub Phone and the Onzo Energy Meter

The Verizon Hub Phone has several nifty features: Wireless and Fixed Calls, Cable TV, traffic reports, web access, call forwarding, contacts etc etc. In short a iPhone type experience based on touch technology that integrates several existing products. This is done to smarten up  the home phone and make it more accessible to the technophobes - they don't care how it works they just want to see their energy bill. Which they can't do. Yet.

You can't even see your energy bill on the Onzo, although you can see energy use. It looks really cool and geeky.  But why pay the same price as the Hub Phone for far less?  Surely the same experience can be delivered from a meter to any number of existing screens: Phone, TV, PC or the Verizon Hub Phone.  And probably to similar UK products coming soon from the likes of Vodafone or O2. Of course it can. And for cheaper. It's only a matter of time.The leap from meter to phone or a similar destination is only one of imagination.The whole point of modern ICT is to simplify things. Not to add yet another application or device, no matter how cool it might look.

Smart is another word for intelligence. And the intelligence in smart meters is the data and various levels of interpreting it. The device itself is actually as dumb as that hunk of metal currently residing under 26 million stairs. It's not the gadget - that's dumb in the meaning of silent. It's the widget on the screen - that's smart.

A far, far Better Place

Apart from the obvious fact that we live on the same planet as 6.7 billion and counting other humans, NHO doesn't classify ourselves as being particularly environmental one way or the other. Whatever the environment hands us, we think life is too short to obsess over the little details surrounding the future of the planet. We just want it to happen, and in the meantime we've got to pay the gas and electric bill. We want to do so in a faster, better and cheaper way, that being our little contribution to the environment: we don't obsess about inconsequential BS. But we also say that while little things don't mean very much, a lot of little things mean a whole bunch.

Since we're business oriented we don't have much time to concentrate on fuel for vehicles. But when we do, it's about the coming revolution in electric vehicles. As usual, conventional wisdom is usually wrong, and if people consider what we might call baseload vehicle use, they won't obsess so much about peak load.

The average UK journey length is less than 7 miles per day. Which means electric cars would be perfect for most of us. Not all, most. But drivers sometimes want to go to the beach,or that big shopping mall or grandma's house or drive to Spain. For that,they like to have big and comfortable beasts. 

There are a number of mainstream electric vehicles (EV) coming into view, especially the Chevy Volt allegedly late this or early next year. But we love original thinking and Better Place's backstory is fascinating. Who wants to charge up every 150 miles or so? The answer: don't reinvent the car. People are used to cars.They like cars.They are already sold on cars. But if you re-invent the battery and how it is charged, then you're on to something.

The Better Place automated battery switch replaces a depleted EV battery with a fully charged one in just a few minutes, allowing consumers to drive their EVs on long distance trips without actually recharging en route. The process is quicker, cleaner and easier than filling a gas tank, and doesn’t require the driver to leave the vehicle.

What UK Smart Meters should actually do

Absent sight of the UK SM plans, we make some predictions over the reaction:

• The first question that should be asked is "How big a number is that exactly"? Billions will be bandied about to either show how impressive this is (the government, some greens and a possible utility line) or how much this will cost innocent bill payers ( the Daily Mail, nuke fans and a possible utility line). We may not hear about the true impact per consumer per year. So divide the cost figure by 46 million to reflect the number of gas and power meters and then by 20 to reflect the current life span of a meter before it gets replaced. All of a sudden that number isn't so scary. Or newsworthy.
• Because of the above, marketing of smart meters could start off stupidly. Smart Metering means going from data drought to data deluge - from total ignorance to omniscient knowledge.The lesson that has been avoided the last 15 years in the murky and muddled debate over any "benefits" of competition, i.e. less energy used means less money paid still can't be wriggled away from. Smart Metering is going to be especially difficult to introduce in the UK because most of us, including too many business users, come to the debate with complete ignorance. How can we compare the benefits of smart metering, without having any idea of how much it costs us today? 
• We can't get caught up in the geeky aspects of all this. We've already wasted years that way in the pointlessness of consultants or switching sites, which even Ofgem admits are as likely to provide higher costs than lower ones. We've said it for months: SM is the gadget, data is the widget which will appear on a tv/computer/iPhone/Sony/Google/O2/Orange/Sky/take your choice screen. Smart Metering is the razor, but the money is in the blades which is data. The Big Six domestic suppliers and the smaller but still sizable business energy suppliers should understand this very well: This could be the day the utility business as we see it in the UK died.

The Cutting Edge of Light

Organic Light Emitting Diode lighting is one of a number of reasons for our optimism long term over energy prices. However the lux level is delivered,  be it fluorescent, incandescent or halogen, lighting is anywhere from 20 to 40% of business electricity spend. If OLED lives up to the hype and lighting becomes too cheap to meter, 20% of energy demand also disappears into thin air by 2020.  The implications are obvious. 

Everyone knows about how the incandescent bulb is dying but many don't realise that the low usage (13w v 60W) CFL bulbs that get so much ire from Daily Mail  readers are only a stop gap.  LED bulbs can save even more energy. The light quality approaches daylight levels of colour at up 75% savings reported by business users. Even today, payback is measured in  weeks or months, but with the next generation of manufacturing promising them cheaper than incandescent, the final curtain of the Edison Age is nigh.

But the next generation of advanced lighting belongs to OLEDs. Philips, Osram and GE, i.e. anyone who matters in illumination, are betting the company on a future of printable lighting that promises eventually to be as cheap as cotton, or even paper, and as easy to manufacture. How can anything beat that?  How about ultra low power display technology and portable electronic (WiFi enabled of course) paper?  Naturally , the science fiction aspects of all this make one cautious, although we think how could people like GE and Philips invest in this if the writing wasn't on their electronic walls? 

A usually reliable indicator of trouble in any product is when delivery dates slip.  So what can it mean when delivery of the first product comes out a year ahead of analyst predictions?

Philips is selling a Philips Lumiblade experience kit on its official site right now. €70 (£62) will get you a base kit, and prices for the Philips Lumiblade OLED lights themselves vary from €157 (£140) for a small circle to €566 (£500) for the largest rectangular panel. All come in white, red, green and blue shades, but there’s potential for many more colours, and the Philips Lumiblade stencils available point to the flexibility of the technology to fit anywhere in the home once prices come down.

First adopter pricing of course is no indication of the future prices, but if it works now, future OLED will be better, brighter and cheaper.  The Lumiblade Web Site   while saying that

As a rule of thumb: we expect the efficiency to double every 2-3 years

makes it mighty tempting looking already.  Interestingly enough the first sales are aimed at designers, which explains the choice of Milan as the the launch site.

Smart Metering and the Sixth Sense

Anyone working on smart metering needs to watch this from the invaluable TED series , to both understand how analog even current smart metering is and how far behind metering is from other technology.  Imagination can show what is possible now.

The video has mind blowing stuff about the work of the MIT Fluid Interfaces Group:

By outfitting ourselves with digital accessories, we can continually learn from (and teach) our surroundings. The uses of this tech -- from healthcare to home furnishings, warfare to supermarkets -- are powerful and increasingly real.

We like to ... invent bandwagons rather than jump on them

Depending on your point of view, Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense home page shows a view of the world that makes science fiction seem possible and today's technology appear outdated on arrival.

Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.

Tweeting outside the box on Smart Metering

We've said for a while, that bi-directional smart metering is a nice to have, but why should we wait 10 years or more for it?  Most people, as we noted last week in the post Thinking outside the Box on Smart Metering, need a widget not a gadget: software not hardware.

We think that SM will be delivered through Home Area Networks sometime in the next 18 months to five years. But the geeks at Tweet-a-Watt have something that might not be exactly what we want, but it's here today and it works.  Energy is measured at each device level and sent to an application that transmits it to Twitter. Now Twitter strikes us a horrible application: most people over the age of fifteen don't need to know in real time every thought as it strays across their friend's cerebellum or what someone had for dinner. But the concept here of energy information delivered straight to an iPhone appeals to us. In fact we had asked for exactly that in a post last July.

First the idea, then proof of concept, and now they release this open source application out in to the world. Someone will get seriously rich on something like this, unfortunately it won't be us.