Sprint announced out its Smart Grid ambitions this week. Sprint says it is focusing their Smart Grid initiatives on key applications such as Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) like Automatic meter reading, SCADA, Demand-Response (DR) Distribution Management System (DMS) and M2M applications.
The Smart Grid aims to enhance the electric grid by optimizing energy delivery through distributed sensing.
Robert Gustin, Sprint’s national program manager for utilities, says about 20 percent of Sprint’s hundreds of existing utility customers are now involved with the company in some form of machine-to-machine smart grid project. It can include things like serving as the backhaul, or wide area, network for smart meters or distribution automation equipment.
Grid Net is using WiMAX and is said to be one of the first truly “open-standards” based approaches to building a meter. Smart grid initiatives have been announced by AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, using their networks to link utilities to smart power meters and grid control systems, notes Seeking Alpha.
A $200 million smart meter project planned by Florida Power & Light, is one of the larger projects. The companies lined up on the project include General Electric and Silver Spring Networks, two of the more familiar names in smart grid, as well as a relative newcomer: Cisco. Silver Spring will provide an open standards-based, secure wireless network communications while Cisco will help design and implement a secure and intelligent communications platform within the county’s transmission and distribution grid.
Companies developing devices to work on Sprint’s network include top smart meter makers GE, Elster, Landis+Gyr and Itron. There are roughly 320 million electric, gas and water meters in the United States.
Sprint’s utility clients recently said they’re expecting to install about 12 million smart grid devices over the coming decade that will need a communications network of some kind.
North American utilities have so far shied away from using cellular communications since utilities have tended to seek to own their own communications systems, partly because they get to charge customers for the costs of capital projects through increased electricity rates. The comparatively high cost of going cellular, compared to lower-cost wireless mesh or power line carrier technologies, has also played a role.
A partnership between AT&T and smart meter networking provider SmartSynch links residential smart meters via AT&T’s networks, while T-Mobile USA has a partnership with smart meter maker Echelon to offer similar functionality. Verizon Wireless recently announced a joint venture with Qualcomm.
But Sprint’s Gustin believes that the real breakthrough will come when a new, standardized communications technology comes along — something like WiMax.
Sprint has been working with both GE and CenterPoint Energy, using utility-owned WiMax radios from General Electric for smart meter backhaul communications. General Electric thinks 100 kilobits per second might be fine for reading electric meters. But 1 to 2 megabits per second is what’s needed to make the split-second automation of the electricity distribution grid a reality.
GE is also backing startup Grid Net, which makes WiMax communications modules that go into GE smart meters now being tested in Australia. Sprint has worked with Grid Net as well, Gustin said.
To Clearwire’s chief strategy officer, Scott Richardson, it sounds like a pretty sweet deal, reports Money Magazine. “The utilities get a device they can manage remotely, the home user gets to assess how much energy he’s using, and we get the opportunity to sell broadband to that end user.”
Sprint is expected to announce a raft of new smart grid-related projects and partnerships in the coming weeks and months. Those could include projects that are seeking some of the $3.9 billion in smart grid stimulus grants that the Department of Energy expects to start giving out later this year.
Earth2Tech has a cheat sheet of smart grid firms lining up for DOE cash. SmartGridNews covers the beat.
Dailywireless has more on AMR, including ABI: Stimulus Means Big Bucks for Wireless, The Smart Grid: Licensed or Unlicensed Spectrum, Cellular-enabled SCADA, Smart Grid: Dumb or What?, Smart Grid: It’s Alive!, Google: Smart Power R US, 900 Mhz Telemetry, Traffic Cameras and ITS and the Corpus Christi Cloud .
