THROUGH one door, a research and development office packed with engineers, verification and test equipment, instruments in various forms of disassembly wired up in arrays. Through another, an extended assembly line where PCBs are put into plastic cases, to be passed on to a calibration lab. But this is not Shenzhen, rather Landis+Gyr’s facility in Alexandria, NSW.
“The most exciting electronics project today,” is how Dr Keith Torpy, chief technology officer of Landis+Gyr Asia Pacific, describes the smart grid devices which his company develops, manufactures and assembles.
“For us, this is really a boom time,” Dr Torpy told Electronics News. “We are planning to expand R&D from the current 35 engineers to 55 and 65 next year. Everyone else is scaling down, but we are one of the few companies advertising for embedded engineers, hardware engineers, application software engineers, project engineers and project managers.”
Much of this development effort is being directed at a small grey box which will sit in utility enclosure or some unobtrusive corner of houses and apartments. That box houses a smart meter.
Smart meters will play a small but vital role in solving some of the biggest headaches for Australia’s utility companies, and enable unparalleled energy management capabilities, not just for energy retailers and distributors, but also for consumers.
Grid anxiety
Price increases for electricity are regular news. In June 2012, for example, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) approved an average power price increase of 18 percent for NSW, sparking predictable outrage and calls for policy overhauls.
But things are due to get even worse. Back in September 2011, during a presentation to the Powering Australia Conference [PDF], Edwin O’Young, an analyst with Port Jackson Partners, noted that Australian retail electricity prices have risen by over 35 percent in the past four years, with no reprieve in sight, He noted that electricity prices for consumers would almost double in the next six years.
While the introduction of carbon pricing and rising costs for coal and gas increase the cost of wholesale electricity, the bulk of these price increases have to do with network charges, the costs of dealing with rising peak demand, replacement and upgrades for distribution infrastructure, and fees to meet increased standards.
According to Landis+Gyr’s Dr Torpy, the costs that are coming to the fore now are a symptom of consistent under-investment in power distribution infrastructure, particularly that required to deal with peak demand.
While the load is constant for much of the day, there are big peaks in electrical consumption in the hours between 6 and 9am, and 4 and 8pm, as people get ready for work or school, or return from these places.
This inconsistency in demand is aggravated during summer and winter, due to loads from air conditioning and heating. And with larger houses being built, and bigger air conditioning and heating systems built in, demand is not coming down any time soon.
“The poles and wires were put in 20 years ago. They have a peak current-carrying capacity. But since then consumption has gone up by 30 to 50 percent – how can the infrastructure cope with that?” Dr Torpy asked.
“This is creating a significant challenge to distribution businesses by putting a lot of stress on the networks and their reliability.”
The ageing infrastructure is also not dealing well with newer energy sources and the variable load they can bring, according to Robin Eckerman, president of Smart Grid Australia.
“By deploying more and more intermittent energy sources on the grid, like photovoltaic arrays, we’re fundamentally changing its character,” said Eckerman. “Both the supply and demand side are getting more and more unpredictable.”
“[For example], there’s a wave of electric vehicles coming. If they all blindly start sucking on the grid after people have driven home from work, they’ll create massive new peaks at the worst possible time.”
For many energy providers, the solution is to improve their infrastructure, to the tune of billions of dollars. But smarter management of the grid may well turn out to be the most cost-effective way forward, and this is where smart grids and smart meters will play their part.
Changing behaviour
However many new towers and poles the utilities put in, the only real long-term solution to smooth out peaks in demand is for consumers to change their pattern of use.
The utilities have introduced time of day tariffs, monitored by electronic meters, so that they can charge more at peak times to create an incentive for people to reduce consumption during peak hours. But this approach has had only limited success.
“Most of the early work on smart meters was based around the assumptions that their introduction would cause people to change their consumption habits,” Eckerman said. “But there is already data coming in that long-term sustained behavioural change doesn’t occur very easily … for the most people, the price differences have to be very, very great to induce a significant behavioural change.”
Nonetheless, while the carrot-and-stick approach might not have gained much traction, the insight and control provided by the coming generation of smart meters may provide both the power and motivation for consumers to change their own behaviour.
The power to change energy consumption behaviour comes from the ‘intelligence’ of the smart meter. These devices allow homes and businesses to interface with their energy retailer via true two-way communication. They will communicate with home energy management systems (HEMS) via wireless protocols like ZigBee or Wi-Fi.
Some utilities have already extended the concept, by starting to build internet portals which leverage the data from smart meters, so customers can access and control their energy usage and rates, not just from HEMS panels at home, but via any Internet-capable device.
The hope is that smart meters will lead to new energy usage models, allowing, for example, pre-payment for electricity, or for users to enter into detailed usage agreements with utilities to limit their usage and costs.
This could lead to situations, for instance, whereby the customer, when alerted to the potential for excessive use, may voluntarily drop loads. They may also agree with the utility to be subject to a higher rate in exchange for being able to use the amount of electricity they desire to use, or have a pre-agreed contract which allows the utility to send a signal to the smart meter - some of Landis+Gyr’s meters have a disconnect relay and two auxiliary circuits outside of the lighting circuit which can be controlled by the utility or the users - and drop supply to the auxiliary circuits as a hard measure to prevent over-usage.
On the HEMS side, smart meters open the way for appliance makers to integrate energy management into their devices.
“It will create a catalyst for manufacturers to start building smarter appliances,” said Eckerman. “Instead of a dishwasher that you goes when you press the button, the unit could be programmed to run only if the electricity price goes below a certain threshold, or run in certain hours [to avoid peak demand].
“The grid could keep the meter informed on its state, and the appliances could talk to the meter, or they could talk through the meter to various intelligent devices in the grid,” he added.
Key communication
Communications will be the key enabler for delivering all the promises of smart meters and smart grids. These communication won’t just be between the smart meter and the home, but, perhaps more importantly, between the meter and the utility.
The regulated smart-grid roll-out in Victoria predominantly uses RF mesh communications, creating a self-healing network of smart meters where information is forwarded to neighbourhood routers or base stations, and transmitted back to the utility.
For its part, Landis+Gyr is working on point-to-point technology based on 3G, WiMAX and LTE (4G), and is also looking at using the National Broadband Network’s (NBN) Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) for smart meter connectivity.
“If NBN has very high penetration and connectivity, then we will have a product that can connected to the optical network terminal (ONT),” the company’s Dr Torpy told Electronics News. “The ONT will have multiple branches, supporting up to four ports. So one port could be used for the smart meter.”
While smart meters are expected to use a certain amount of bandwidth to transmit and receive information, a more important aspect for Dr Torpy is the commonality of the communications channel. This is why ADSL and cable, with their various hardware and software idiosyncrasies, are not seen as suitable candidates for smart meter communications.
“The NBN [will] provide a physical channel (PHY) which will be common to every house, so it makes it simpler for us, from a protocol perspective, to support,” said Dr Torpy. “We will have one hardware interface and a software interface, to have maximum penetration.”
A core concept for the smart grid is the emergence of an Automatic Meter Infrastructure (AMI), as opposed to the Automatic Meter Read (AMR) model currently enabled by electronic meters.
“The fundamental for AMR was to get metering data and load profile data once every 24 hours,” explained Dr Torpy. “You would get the meters to wake-up - either through a wake-up signal or pre-programmed signal - and supply the 24 hours data by pushing from the meter into the network.”
In contrast, AMI allows continuous synchronous information flow, allowing utilities to, for example, broadcast commands, create dynamic load controls, and disconnect or connect houses as needed.
AMI-enabled smart meters will support alerts for events like outage. If the power to the meter goes down, supercapacitors within the communications circuit sustain operations for up to 16 seconds, providing time for the smart meters to send an alert out to the utility.
A benefit of such features is that they give utilities deeper insight into their networks - something which is sorely needed.
Power retailers currently have control and monitoring down to the zone substation of their networks (which have SCADA monitoring systems and backhaul connectivity to the central office), but very little visibility into the area of the grid between the zone substation and the individual meter.
That means that currently, the utility only knows if there is a wide-spread area outage; if only a single or few homes downside of a distribution transformer go down, they usually will not find out until the customer calls them.
Talking hardware
Given the variety of communication options possible, Landis+Gyr engineers its smart meters so they are modular, with a sealed but removable cover at the top providing access to a secure communications module inside.
This allows utilities to change the communications module and medium at any time to suit their needs.
“It’s intrinsically safe, fully isolated, and you don’t have to open up or power down the meter,” said Dr Torpy. “You just break two seals, change out the module, and it will self-register on the new network and be up and running.”
The smart meter’s body and the communications module is connected by a standard serial port which provides both data and a 12V DC power supply from the body to the module.
The communications module itself has two PCBs: an adapter board with regulator circuitry, and the specific communications board, which is host to any necessary antennas and holds a microcontroller for managing communications, including prioritising urgent signals.
The meter has one board which takes care of the human-machine interface (HMI), holding the optical port, buttons and LCD. An isolated power supply is also held within the body, powering the module and providing up to 10W to the communications module.
At the core of the meter is the microcontroller, which provides the smart meter with its processing power. Current-generation Landis+Gyr electronic meters (which Dr Torpy does not regard is being truly “smart”) also have 8-bit, 32kByte Flash-memory - plus some auxiliary RAM – microcontrollers from Texas Instruments. But the smart meter is a leap forward.
“The smart meter is no longer just an electricity meter…[it] is becoming what we call an ‘intelligent endpoint’,” Dr Torpy said. “Current-generation smart meters use the Renesas M16 16-bit controllers, but we are now starting to see 32-bit ARM9 controllers.”
“We are also contemplating RAM increases to 16MByte, with 8MByte of Flash memory. The microcontroller is powerful enough to run Linux allowing for resident applications on the intelligent endpoint.”
The idea is for the smart meter to download applications upon demand for occasional tasks, and this, coupled with analytical capabilities (including measurement of 21st harmonic split, sags and swells, under-voltage and faulty neutrals) could help utilities deal with the other big problem that faces the electrical grid – power quality fluctuations due to an influx of new devices.
“A residence of the future may have a solar panel, an inverter, a gas-fired power plant, a plasma TV, and extremely high density LED lighting,” explained Dr Torpy. “Solar panels and inverters feed a lot of harmonics back to the network. And LED lighting and plasma TVs create reactive loads, as opposed to a resistive loads, decreasing the power factor.”
Dr Torpy explains that an application could be downloaded and run from time to time to look at the load profile to see if there have been any changes in the type of power consumption.
Australian development
While Landis+Gyr is a global company, it has a localisation policy, meaning that while platforms are shared across the group, meters are engineered in Australia to fit Australian standards, which differ from British or ANSI standards.
“Australian standards are probably the toughest standards for isolation. The meter must be able to withstand 12kV, 9 joules,” Dr Torpy said. “Many specifications around the world are happy with 0.5 joules, but the National Measurement Institute’s (NMI) requirement for 9 joules means we have to do the R&D in Australia.”
Dr Torpy explains that everything, the firmware, the hardware, right from concept to schematic and through to the PCB, is developed locally. Prototyping is also done in Australia using local PCB and assembly facilities for the prototypes.
Testing is done at the UL laboratory in New Zealand, where the smart meters are tested to both the NMI and Australian/IEC standards.
Volume board and enclosure production is outsourced to Chinese manufacturers, and Landis+Gyr is also looking to work with Foxconn, via its new facility in Vietnam.
However, the company brings the PCBs and enclosures back to Australia, assembling 95 percent of its meters in the country.
Because of the intense R&D work for both the meter and communications modules in Australia, the local team is taking on a leading role within the Asia Pacific region, even helping the Indian and Japanese businesses with their smart meter development.
“Japan is also going through a major smart meter roll-out that could include more than 35 million meters. Because we are part of [Japanese company] Toshiba, it is keen for us to develop meters for this Japanese,” said Dr Torpy.
The link to Toshiba will allow Landis+Gyr to further develop the capabilities of its smart meters, leveraging its parent company’s semiconductor capabilities for making systems-on-chip (to be integrated into the front-end of smart meters in order to drive down costs), Flash memory, and other components.
A clear roadmap
While Dr Torpy is not at liberty to disclose the specific plans of the company, he says Landis+Gyr has developed a roadmap for the next seven to eight years.
“We are very clear on where we think the trend is going in smart metering and what we require. We have some extremely advanced concepts that we are going to bring to the market,” he said.
These include connecting various utilities such as water and gas to the smart meter, either by having a unified device or through low-power Wi-Fi, meters that can calculate carbon footprint and dynamic load control while dealing with systems that handle distributed generation.
In under a decade, companies like Landis+Gyr have advanced metering technology from “spinning disc” units to electronics-based meters, and on to intelligent end-points.
Utilities now need to establish their networks and intelligent grid devices, along with data management and analysis systems in order to truly derive real benefits from a smart grid.
Smart meters may only be a small part of the smart grid, but that small grey box represents a true convergence of the latest in semiconductor, communications and IT technologies to solve a large-scale problem which touches every Australian.