SmartSynch Jazzes Up the Big Easy

By Kathleen Davis, Associate Editor, Utility Automation Engineering T&D, June 2008

SmartSynch held their I3 Symposium in New Orleans April 14-16. They kicked off the three-day conference with a dinner at the Ritz-Carton on Canal St. featuring local football legend Archie Manning as keynote speaker. A football great in his own right, Manning is also the father to both Peyton and Eli Manning. He spoke about team work, management and leadership.

Team work, management and leadership seemed to be themes that ran throughout SmartSynch’s symposium, whether the smart grid or networks were under discussion, the gathering emphasized the industry working together—vendors, customers, utilities, regulators—to find solutions to technology and interconnection issues, as well as regulatory demands.

SmartSynch CEO Stephen Johnston began the first conference session with a “state of the union” address about the company. He also introduced a new routing solution they’ve developed for their SmartMeter System. According to Johnston, it enables smart meters from different meter manufacturers to interoperate across the same (or different) networks, be they GPRS, CDMA or Wi-Fi.

“Just to cover that point: The state of the union is good,” Johnston told the crowd. “It’s an exciting time to be in this industry, because the technologies we choose today will shape this industry’s future.”

He added, “Our commitment to you is to ‘build new stuff.’ We’re going to innovate. That’s what we do.”

After Johnston’s announcement, three speakers laid out their viewpoints about “Market Forces, from AMI to Smart Grid to the Future,” as the title of the session spelled out. This morning meeting featured J.D. Hammerly, the VP of Energy Infrastructure Solutions from Battelle Energy Technology, Dan Delurey, executive director of the Demand Response Coordinating Committee, and Jon Brock, president and COO of UtiliPoint International.

Hammerly opened the conference side of the symposium with interesting concepts, looking at demand response from the aspect of cash.

“There’s a direct tie between revenue and demand response,” he stated, pointing out that the first spinning reserves that show up in a market come from demand response, not from revving up generation.

Hammerly went on to reveal that the supply-driven market of the current power industry “cannot continue,” that we must balance the supply/demand equation in order to meet growing energy demands, growing regulatory demands, and to answer questions about carbon efficiency.

He listed a number of ways to balance the equation: asset utilization methods like thermostats and end-use control devices, as well as distributed resources and storage; enabling technologies that value communications, performance and protocol, like grid-friendly appliances; customer engagement that is non-invasive and thoughtful; and value realization for peak energy, grid congestion and ancillary services.

He concluded that “demand response needs to become an equivalent source to generation.”

When asked how to make customers interested in demand response, Hammerly stated, “Reach into areas that customers don’t care so much about. Don’t turn off the TV during ‘American Idol.’ Instead, put off washing the dishes for five or 10 minutes.”

Brock, from Utilipoint International, took a look back at the history of the power industry since 1992, which he summed up by saying that “regulatory ‘bliss’ led to a retail ‘craze’ which moved to a ‘back-to-basics’ idea then on to ‘innovation,’ which brings us to the smart grid/smart metering place” we are now. But, in the end, there’s been a bit of “full circle” going on.

“Regulatory recovery was … and is … the name of the game,” he said, adding that “AMI, MDM and demand response go hand in hand.”

Those regulatory issues, Brock pointed out, have led to longer sales cycles and a larger number of pilot programs, which is where demand response can lighten the load. He thinks the time is right for these kinds of programs.

“What we’ve seen recently is an interest on the part of regulators, consumer advocates and customers for something from utilities other than higher bills,” he stated.

“We’re starting to see younger people want to change the world. The new society will make changes with that benefit in mind, but, for today’s customer, the big incentive is money [when it comes to demand response programs],” he added.

Thinking about the customer led nicely to the following luncheon, which featured a speech by Brent Rice, executive director for customer solutions at PNM Resources and dove-tailed nicely into the afternoon conference session about preparing for AMI and how AMI can enable the smart grid. That session offered a host of speakers from Rick Pospiech, senior financial analyst at DTE Energy to Matt Smith, director of technology development for Duke’s “Utility of the Future” project.

Pospiech, with DTE Energy, discussed the partnership they have personally developed with SmartSynch to remotely read interval meters. They installed 575 smart meters in the DTE Service Area to support choice profiling. The meters replaced ones with analog telemetry.

The meter project was rolled out at the same time DTE Energy was introducing a new enterprise business system (EBS), and a new meter data management (MDM) system. They had two months to bench-test, provide training, and install the new meters, but they had a dedicated project support team from SmartSynch to help them, Pospiech stated. Ninety percent of the meters were successfully installed, a number far higher than the 70 percent they say in 1999. He attributed the success to: self-contained under the glass technology, communication validation field tests performed throughout the DTE Service Area using a SmartSynch Communication Validation Unit (CVU), and less than 1 percent of the sites experiencing communication failures.

The final conference session, “The Intersection of Emerging Technologies with the Utility of the Future,” brought together experts from AT&T Mobility, Comverge, Motorola, Sprint and T-Mobile to discuss networks and strategies for supporting the utility of the future. Details about backward compatibility, secure data problems and case studies were discussed.

Tom Gregor, manager of sales engineering at T-Mobile, brought it all full circle with his speech on how demand response can help move the “peak” and cut down the “peak” for a utility network.

“Demand response is a small part of a portfolio solution for utilities today,” he stated, and that portfolio includes many options from vendors in the energy arena. As each session brought home the point of teamwork in the energy industry, and that teamwork doesn’t mean you lose your competitive edge.

“This market is very large, and it’s global,” Johnston stated earlier in the symposium. “There will be many winners in this space.”

From Utility Automation Engineering T&D, June 2008.

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