By Mike Phillips
There is wide agreement that the combination of electrification and a low-carbon power grid is the most viable path towards meeting our decarbonization goals for buildings and transportation. Energy efficiency and demand flexibility are key drivers to allow us to do this cost effectively. These approaches are essential because without them, the industry will need to overbuild grid capacity and storage. By influencing when and how much energy is used, we can support the coming expansion of electrification and use of renewable sources with much less disruption to the grid.
Smart meters will play an important role in this path to decarbonization. Smart meter data analytics will deliver value in areas such as grid optimization, customer experience, and distributed energy resource integration. The global penetration of smart meters will climb from approximately 44% at the end of 2020 to 56% by the end of 2028, resulting in over 1.2 billion devices globally according to Guidehouse.
Announced in 2020 and coming to market now, the first of a new generation of AMI meters uses high resolution waveform data to provide far more detailed insights both behind the meter and at the grid edge. Next year, as utilities and policymakers make decisions about AMI deployments, it’s important for decision makers to understand the role that these new meters can play in consumer engagement, potentially making or breaking the success of energy efficiency and demand response programs.
While the conventional wisdom has been that you cannot engage consumers around energy (based on the often-quoted statistic that American energy customers spend roughly eight minutes a year interacting with their utility online), the reality is that the people living in a home have a big impact on how their homes work, including when and how much energy they use. We can’t afford to neglect customer engagement and still expect to succeed.
Customer impact is not just about remembering to turn off the lights — the real gains occur when customers have tools and programs to help them choose the right devices and appliances to use in their homes, can track down random energy hogs, and can utilize applications and automation to better use energy in their homes. One example would be an energy-smart home charger that automatically charges electric vehicles based on the cost of energy and the state of the grid.
We’ve found that the key to engaging consumers is to provide real-time applications with detailed visibility and control of what is happening in their homes. Sense recently collaborated with OhmConnect to see if real-time consumer engagement could impact demand response savings via a combination of OhmHour rewards and high engagement with the Sense app. Participants reduced their energy usage 313W per OhmHour on average, lowered their home energy usage by 18%, and increased their average savings by 160% over a more typical customer.
The impacts of this next level of engagement could be staggering: a recent study by The Brattle Group and Oracle Utilities found that actions by residential utility customers could avoid sending 534 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2040, which is the equivalent of retiring more than half of the coal plants in the U.S.
The previous generation of AMI meters with 15-minute interval data, which might be delayed up to 24 hours before consumers could see it, simply didn’t offer the sort of real-time, detailed experience needed for consumer engagement. We have found that customer engagement drops off with delays of even a few seconds — consumers can no longer relate what they see in an application to what is happening in their homes. So, with delays that could reach hours, it is not surprising that utilities have not been able to engage consumers using the existing infrastructure — and is what has led Sense and others to deploy specific in-home hardware.
But there is a new generation of AMI meters that can support applications like Sense — without the need for additional hardware in the home. To support real-time detailed applications, meters need three new capabilities:
High resolution waveform data: To support a detailed view into activity in homes and to diagnose a range of failure modes in devices and the grid, we use a technology called load disaggregation. Even one-second Interval data is not sufficient for real-time load disaggregation. Instead, a continuous stream of voltage and current waveforms must be sampled tens of thousands of times per second.
Edge computing: Given the high data rates required, the main work needs to be done in the meter itself. There are now a number of meter-based edge computing platforms able to run applications. The key is to have enough edge computing power that has access to the raw data stream.
Low-latency networking: Meters typically use a mesh network designed for reliability but not speed. To support a real-time consumer experience with delays within one or two seconds, meters need an additional networking path for the consumer applications, which can be Wi-Fi or cellular.
The plots below show the difference between one second interval data and high resolution waveform data — in this case for detecting anomalies in the grid. In this example, there was a fault in a power line which then shows up at the edge of the grid. The anomaly is not visible in the one-second interval data but it becomes clear in the voltage waveforms. The same sort of thing is true for the activities of devices in the home: real-time load disaggregation is just not possible without this level of detail.
The advent of real-time, dynamic energy data could dramatically reshape the customer and utility relationship. Whether as part of a demand response program or a time-of-use (TOU) rate plan, customers could examine their device-level usage at the exact moment when prices are higher or incentives are available for reduced demand. For their part, utilities will be able to pinpoint device-level consumption that can inform their efforts to target flexible grid loads. This emerging set of capabilities will enable new paradigms in managing assets behind the meter while giving customers greater control over home comfort and energy costs.
Making the right decisions now is key. Utilities and regulators are considering AMI rollouts now that will result in meters that stay in homes through 2040 and beyond. While we cannot predict the details of what is needed in the energy transition through this time period, we do know that the need for engaged consumers equipped with tools and applications to better understand and manage how energy is used in their homes is not going away. We need to make sure the smart meter infrastructure is up to the task and can adapt to changing needs in the future.
This means having the core capabilities of high-resolution waveform data, edge computing, and flexible networking, along with the ability to securely run applications with over-the-air updates. There are now meters on the market with all these capabilities, so choosing an older generation of metering infrastructure that locks utilities into limited capabilities is no longer the right decision.
There has been a lot of talk about the role smart meters will play in the energy transition. In 2022, we must focus on the technology and architecture that will enable true, real-time applications that engage consumers.
Mike Phillips is CEO and co-founder of Sense, which works with energy infrastructure providers and utilities to bring consumer-engaging applications to market.
