by Olivier Pauzet, Sierra Wireless

Why can’t we just communicate? That’s the question on the minds of utilities and electrical engineers worldwide as they build a new generation of smart grid infrastructures.

With real-time, two-way communications across the grid, energy suppliers can revolutionize power generation and distribution, improve diagnostics and forecasting and serve more consumers with less energy.

Many energy suppliers have been communicating with power generation sites and substations for several years.

Now though, we’ve entered the next phase of the smart grid revolution: extending communications all the way to residential meters.

Deploying communications intelligence under glass in residential meters will create billions of new smart grid entry points and begin unlocking the full potential of smart grid efficiencies.

Recognizing this, governments and utilities worldwide are investing in smart metering deployments. EU member countries will have smart meters across 80 percent of their infrastructures by 2020. ABI Research projects 212 million smart meters will be deployed worldwide by 2014.

The smart grid is coming soon to your neighborhood, but how will it communicate?

There are many options, but a growing number of energy suppliers are turning to cellular wireless wide-area networks (WWAN).

Machina Research projects machine-to-machine (M2M) cellular communications in the utilities sector will reach 1.5 billion connections by 2020, mostly because of smart metering.

There are good reasons for this market momentum. A properly constructed cellular metering infrastructure can deliver compelling benefits, including being deployed much more quickly, at a much lower cost than other communications technologies.

Taking Advantage of Cellular Communications

Energy suppliers might have been skeptical about WWAN communications, but that time is long in the past.

Cellular is a mature, proven technology that delivers all the security and reliability of a wired infrastructure.

Modern cellular solutions can meet industrial-grade specifications and provide reliable operation in the field for many years.

One billion machines already use cellular networks, including millions of connected monitoring devices used by energy suppliers to link substations and industrial sites, as well as residential metering infrastructures.

In the age of the smart grid, however, cellular technology can offer important business and strategic advantages, as well.

Why invest in deploying, maintaining and continually updating a vast communications network when you can outsource communications to an existing public carrier? Why develop partnerships with multiple, regional wireline service providers when you can connect your entire customer base over a single cellular network?

Cellular infrastructures also lower installation costs, allowing utilities to configure meters remotely instead of having to dispatch skilled technicians on-site to millions of homes. With mobile operators seeking to capture their share of the growing M2M market, cellular data rates are more competitive than ever.

From a deployment perspective, cellular is also fast. Using an existing, public wireless network instead of building one from scratch can cut months or years from a smart metering project timeline.

Cellular networks extend virtually everywhere, covering 99 percent of the addressable population for smart metering, including remote areas. This is especially valuable in developing nations that might not have mature wireline data infrastructures.

WWAN Options

Cellular carriers use different technologies in different markets, but most smart metering infrastructures fall into two categories: second-generation (2G) and third-generation (3G) cellular systems.

Most early M2M systems used lower-bandwidth 2G connections. Increasingly, however, energy suppliers and others deploying M2M solutions are considering 3G technologies, as well, because 3G provides higher bandwidth and data rates than 2G connections. The 3G also has come down in price enough that often it’s not significantly more expensive.

Some energy suppliers are even considering new 4G systems, which provide lower latency and faster data rates than 3G.

Although 2G networks typically are more than adequate for basic metering communications, 3G and 4G systems provide flexibility to support future services. As energy suppliers contemplate future smart grid solutions such as home-area networks (HANs) that link power meters to appliances and applications in the home, for example, 3G and 4G connections will provide ample headroom to support these services.

Given that metering solutions ideally will operate in the field for 10, 15, even 20 years before they are replaced, it makes sense to consider these possibilities now and to be sure that a WWAN supplier can provide guidance across all cellular technologies.

Cellular Considerations

Plenty of reasons exist to consider cellular technology. But what goes into a successful WWAN metering infrastructure? Any viable, cellular metering solution should provide:

• Reliability. Smart meters and their communications technologies should be able to stay online for 10, 15 or even 20 years without requiring components be replaced or need any on-site maintenance. Cellular metering solutions should, therefore, be built to industrial-grade specifications to meet extreme environmental conditions of shock, corrosion, temperature, vibration and humidity. For some applications, they also must meet Class I, Division 2 code standards to operate safely in hazardous environments.
• Remote configuration. During the 10- to 20-year life span of a smart meter, the communication module’s firmware likely will be upgraded, for example, to enhance security or comply with changing wireless standards. Utilities must be able to remotely manage, configure, test, validate and upgrade firmware over the air. Cellular solutions also should support patch upgrades so utilities don’t have to transmit the entire firmware package every time they make a minor update.
• Security. Cellular metering solutions must include strong authentication and encryption to protect consumer privacy and data integrity and maintain continuity of service. They should provide jamming detection to recognize deliberate network attacks. And they must be able to continue operating autonomously if they lose connectivity with the cellular network.

Embedding Intelligence

Energy suppliers must answer whether the bulk of the smarts in a smart meter will be deployed in the meter or the communications module.

Many have said the latter is the wiser approach. In this design, the meter is responsible only for metering. The communication module handles all the more sophisticated decisions related to managing meter information, such as connecting with back-end servers, monitoring signal strength, etc.

This approach provides a more modular architecture, allowing suppliers to use a single meter design but integrate different communication technologies to support different regions.

Suppliers also retain the ability to add new capabilities (for example, complying with new security requirements) through software updates, rather than having to replace hardware.

Enabling this kind of intelligence requires a module with operating system-like processing capabilities, if not an actual lightweight operating system.

The cellular solution also should have a robust, comprehensive development platform that includes all the elements necessary to build and customize metering solutions.

Bringing the Promise of the Smart Grid Home

Cellular WWAN likely will play an important role in the future of smart metering infrastructures. Fortunately, modern cellular networks and communication technologies are more than up to the task. With well-designed cellular solutions, energy suppliers can deploy residential metering infrastructures much more quickly and cost-effectively and unleash the full transformative power of smart grid communications.

Author
Olivier Pauzet is senior director of marketing and market strategy at Sierra Wireless. He has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Supelec and an MBA from INSEAD.

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