Focus on now for a better tomorrow

Technology has a nasty history of enabling entire industries to get ahead of themselves. It entices with the lure of new business lines and revenue opportunities. Unfortunately, sometimes industries pay dearly for losing focus on their core businesses. For the utility and energy industry, focus means keeping the power flowing so the revenue keeps flowing.

One doesn’t have to look far to find examples of technology blinders in action. Perhaps the most glaring example is what we’ve seen with the evolution to date of home automation. While the promise of a Jetson-like house of the future has yet to emerge, appliances are increasingly taking on a more Jetson-like feel. The technology industry’s ability to pack massive amounts of computing power into ever-shrinking chips is enabling connectivity in everything from cars to toasters. For the utility industry, tying all of this networking and computing power into remote meters meant the opening of a giant gateway to the home. But it hasn’t quite turned out the way everyone envisioned. Up to now, home automation has been a tough sell. Expectations are that it will not get easier as the economic environment becomes more challenging.

This illustrates why new avenues must be judiciously explored, i.e., they must meet the demands of today while laying a sound foundation for the future. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technologies are part of those enablers that eye the future while protecting the present.

The use of M2M systems is currently driven by:

• Compliance requirements by regulatory agencies;
• Real-time energy management and load shedding;
• Redundant connectivity to critical infrastructure; and
• Customer service, outage isolation and notification.

Effective and efficient management rests on these elements being optimally handled.
Keeping the revenue running is critical, and justifies the cost of deploying M2M solutions. Areas where utilities are deploying wireless M2M technologies today include virtual capacity creation and clean energy initiatives, demand response, and automatic meter reading. With virtual capacity creation (which includes clean energy initiatives), wireless M2M allows utilities to create capacity by very selectively turning on/off assets during peak periods, thus avoiding going to coal or buying megawatts on the costly open market. The need for virtual capacity has become even more critical as the filter down impact of rising oil prices affects the cost of natural gas.

Additionally, companies are using wireless to selectively turn off high use devices, treating them as assets that can be controlled in exchange for lower pricing, as a replacement for building new billion dollar power plants. Automated meter reading through demand recognition and response systems is creating efficiencies and establishing a gateway to control demand response in commercial environments. What we’re seeing is that companies can easily justify putting a wireless monitor on a switch capacitor or meter because of the monitor’s increasingly dropping costs.

Advances in the network are also driving wireless M2M in the utility industry (and across other industries, for that matter). Cellular can now be used where in the past there was no cellular alternative. This can be done because utilities can now eschew shared consumer grade networks for commercial grade wireless M2M networks.

At Numerex, we manage the industry’s most reliable, scalable and secure wireless networks for M2M. The vast coverage and ultra-low latency of our SMSXpressTM network guarantees delivery status, giving customers a highly cost effective network to continually monitor or monitor by exception network assets.

For 30 years, utility assets have been monitored and controlled via private two-way radio systems and demand response has relied on one-way paging technology.

Two-way private radio systems had the advantage of avoiding subscriber billing costs, however, system maintenance/reliability; coverage and data speeds have been eclipsed by modern cellular technology, with carrier grade, redundant architecture.

One-way paging systems allowed utilities to blast commands to thousands of units in a city or target region. For 30 years, the only alternative was to send a text message to these devices, which today is not only prohibitively costly, but also subject to the vagaries of consumer markets and the uncertainty of the paging networks’ future. However, SMS over cellular networks, up to now had several concerns which have held off utility adoption as a paging replacement. On current consumer grade networks, delivery can mean the difference between three seconds and three hours, depending on SMS traffic volumes. SMSXpress bypasses the consumer grade layer (things like ringtones and text votes). It allows a utility that has thousands of devices to send messages in a short period of time with a guarantee of delivery and, more importantly, confirmation that the command was delivered. And the SMSXpress interface to the utility is via common IT practice: web services /SOAP protocol rather than an e-mail or SMPP bind.

One of the other drivers, particularly in the utility field, is security. As business needs drive wider deployment of M2M nodes, utility IT departments worry about the increased risk of network breach. Wireless – even though it uses IP – doesn’t follow the ground rules that traditional landline providers follow, making it difficult for utility IT departments to seamlessly integrate wireless M2M. As the only North American M2M network to earn the coveted ISO/IEC 27001:2005 information security certification (ISO 27001), Numerex gives IT managers the security and control they need. Additionally, Numerex is a public company with a carrier grade network operations center that monitors the service delivery and quality. SMSXpress closes the loop over the fading paging industry.

The network is not only serving the present, but also ready to support the future. It is the foundation. The backbone we’ve developed lays the groundwork for advanced services, gateways to the home and enhanced services – when the market is ready.

Companies in the energy industry are at a crossroads: are they going to let themselves be seduced by the Jetson-like deceptive glitter of services afar off from their core and not yet proven? Or, true to their calling, focus on the demanding reality of the present and use the M2M versatility, scalability, reliability, and redundancy to meet with success the financial pressures coming from public commissions and consumers?