Many industry reports talk about utilities spending $1.6 billion on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology for smart metering and demand response systems by 2011. While most of the revenues over the next five years will be for the advanced metering infrastructure, in-home "Home Area Network (HAN)" applications and devices that interoperate with smart meters for energy savings and conservation have great developer potential.
For two way communications in AMI, many utilities are standardizing on ZigBee standard for wireless communication. So what will ZigBee enable ? First of all for some key definitions :
Difference between AMR and AMI -
- AMR stands for Automated Meter Reading, which in effect are the meters being deployed today by utilties.
- AMI of Automated Metering Infrastructure and extends current Advanced Meter Reading (AMR) technology by providing two way meter communications, allowing commands to be sent toward the home for multiple purposes, including “time-of-use” pricing information, demand-response actions, or remote service disconnects. Wireless technologies are critical elements of the “Neighborhood Area Network” (NAN), aggregating a mesh configuration of up to thousands of meters for back haul to the utility’s IT headquarters.
ZigBee is wireless communication standard for AMI enabled home area networks. Companies like Itron provide AMI solutions on top of Zigbee - http://www.itron.com/
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