The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)® announced today that it is forming the R7.8 Working Group 2 to develop a new standard to enable home electronics to communicate energy use data to smart energy management systems and apps. The new standard will be called CE-Energy Usage Information (CE-EUI) and will conform to the North American Energy Continue reading →
The much-ballyhooed ZigBee Smart Energy Protocol (SEP) 2 has finally been completed and ratified, and the standard is available for download. We could even see devices with SEP 2 by the end of the year and availability in 2014. “The technical work is done, and it’s up to companies to determine what they’re going to Continue reading →
The ZigBee Alliance has announced completion of the development and ratification of the Smart Energy Profile 2 (SEP 2) standard, which provides IP-based information and control for energy management in wired and wireless home area networks (HANs). via www.metering.com | ZigBee Smart Energy Profile 2 standard completed.
GreenPeak Technologies, a leading low power RF-communication semiconductor company, today announced the year of ZigBee. Worldwide, GreenPeak and other ZigBee semiconductor suppliers are now shipping millions of ZigBee chips every week, making ZigBee the only credible open worldwide standard for the smart home supported by cable and satellite operators and other companies playing in the Continue reading →
With nearly two-thirds of DOE AMI grant projects complete as of Dec 31, 2012, utilities who adopted a wait-and-see attitude are anxiously awaiting the business cases that will get them off the dime one way or another. While most are looking for the bottom-line ROI associated with smart grid investment (and rightly so, as any Continue reading →
The ZigBee Alliance has completed its third specification ZigBee IP, which the alliance says is the first open standard for an IPv6-based full wireless mesh networking solution providing seamless Internet connections. ZigBee IP enriches the IEEE 802.15.4 standard by adding network and security layers and an application framework, offering a scalable architecture with end-to-end IPv6 Continue reading →
With nearly two-thirds of DOE AMI grant projects complete as of Dec 31, 2012, utilities who adopted a wait-and-see attitude are anxiously awaiting the business cases that will get them off the dime one way or another. While most are looking for the bottom-line ROI associated with smart grid investment (and rightly so, as any Continue reading →
The ZigBee Alliance, a global ecosystem of companies creating wireless solutions for use in energy management, commercial and consumer applications, today announced the completion and public availability of its third specification, ZigBee IP. ZigBee IP is the first open standard for an IPv6-based full wireless mesh networking solution and provides seamless Internet connections to control Continue reading →
Mesh-networking standard ZigBee now has support for IP, allowing embedded devices (from ‘leccy meters to lightbulbs) to be directly addressed as long as the addresser is using IPv6. The new extension to the standard, ZigBee IP, has been created at the behest of utilities and will be integrated into the next version of the ZigBee Continue reading →
Today, the USNAP Alliance announced that it is implementing a testing and certification program for products implementing the ANSI/CEA-2045 Modular Communication Interface (MCI) Standard from the Consumer Electronics Association. This standard – developed by CEA, the USNAP Alliance and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) – defines a port/plug that enables Smart Grid “ready” consumer Continue reading →
The Chinese government is trying to protect its ailing electric vehicle market by agreeing Thursday to extend subsidies to the industry. China will subsidize electric vehicles sold in 25 cities, expanding from the current five cities, and adopt a unified national subsidy standard, The 21st Century Business Herald reported on Wednesday citing China Association of Continue reading →
The old adage is true – “Trust, but verify.” In this day and age, standards associations, like ZigBee, consist of many different individuals from numerous companies coming together to put together a standard in order to provide consumers with solid, reliable products that interoperate together. Unfortunately, as there are many different individuals (even speaking different Continue reading →
A new standard providing for a modular communication interface (MCI) to be used with any demand response programs has just been released by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). What the standard does is define a port/plug that transforms off-the-shelf consumer products into devices compatible with any utility demand response system via plug-in communications modules that Continue reading →
We’ve all heard the buzz about IEC 61850, the global design standard for substation automation. But how much truth is there to these claims? This question was on the mind of the operations manager of a municipal utility when he visited the ABB Smart Grid Center of Excellence (CoE) in Raleigh, N.C. He was considering Continue reading →
Silent progress is something that many people, including one’s neighbours, like about hybrids but, while they’re so quiet, they’re dangerous, United States safety experts say. Far from encouraging pedestrians and cyclists to watch where they’re going and to remove their music ear-buds when crossing the road, the US’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposes a federal Continue reading →
The Weightless protocol for white space radio networks is now under the management of a Special Interest Group, which aims to get the Cambridge-developed technology established as a standard for the “Internet of Things”. The Weightless SIG hopes today to publish version 0.9 of a proposed standard for machine to machine (M2M) communications, that can link Continue reading →
Sam Sciacca, an IEEE senior member and consultant, works on utility automation, smart grid, and cyber security standards and has co-authored an in-depth article on limitations to the implementation of IEC 61850, which attempts to achieve interoperability in substations and other areas of the grid. As standards are the means to economies of scale, market Continue reading →
OpenADR — an emerging technology for connecting utilities and their power users via two-way communications and control systems — is, as its name denotes, an open standard. The whole point of the Department of Energy and California Energy Commission project that created OpenADR was to spread fast, automated demand response capabilities to the industry at Continue reading →
Renesas Electronics America Inc., the premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, and Grid2Home, a leading software communications company, reiterated their dedication to continued collaboration on the creation of Smart Energy Protocol (SEP) 2.0-compliant solutions. In an industry-first move, the companies have ported SEP 2.0 to Renesas’ microcontrollers (MCUs) and multiple PHYs (IEEE802.15.4 RF, IEEE802.11b RF Continue reading →
Silver Spring Networks has successfully completed Wi-SUN Alliance interoperability tests for the IEEE 802.15.4g global wireless communications standard, which harmonizes the physical layer of a variety of historically deployed wireless systems, standardizing power levels, data rates, modulations, and frequency bands for large scale, outdoor, and topographically challenging environments of smart energy networks. via Silver Spring Continue reading →
