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To better manage electricity networks
All round the world energy companies are increasingly beginning to deploy Broadband Powerline infrastructure (BPL). A major factor in this trend, of course, is the current global warming debate.

The focus of BPL has changed within the last year from broadband connectivity to smart meters on broadband infrastructure, which allow householders to reduce energy costs and energy companies to better manage their network.

Network management is a critical issue. An electricity utility can lose 30 days of profit in a 30-minute electricity spike.

If that’s not an incentive to do something, then I don’t know what would be.

As I have reported in previous analyses of smart meter deployments; if information about the individual electricity usage of a household is made available to the owner, energy savings of up to 15% begin to occur – simply by letting people know what they use, and how they rate in comparison with neighbours, the street, the suburb, etc.

Information about linking individual energy savings to saving trees and reduction in carbon emissions also creates awareness and provides an incentive to change old habits. With the right political will a national BPL network established for this purpose alone could earn itself back in five to ten years. And, of course, much more can be done with such a network.

Looming shortage in local access capacity
Electricity companies already have very extensive telecoms networks in place and for a long time they have sold off their extra capacity to telecoms companies.

A similar development is envisaged with BPL. To provide an optimal BPL service electricity companies will drive fibre as deep as possible into their network, limiting BPL to inhouse deployment, and perhaps a few hundred metres between the house and the distribution network. This can be designed on a ‘needs’ basis – some areas with more or less fibre, some with faster or slower fibre upgrades.

By the end of this year it will become evident, globally, that the telcos simply don’t have enough capacity in their local access networks to cater for all the new services that people are using, especially video-based applications.

The electricity companies have a role to play here as well. They can make available some of their BPL capacity to alleviate the looming local access capacity problems. Every little bit of local access relief will be welcome.

Tackling global warming
However, as mentioned above, the big driver at the moment is global warming. Several states in the USA now have energy-saving commitments in place – for example, no new power plants. Such initiatives will create problems if we don’t start using the energy produced by existing power plants more cleverly (for the purpose of this article alternative energy sources are not taken into account). States such as California, Michigan and Wisconsin are leading some of these developments.

In Europe, Germany and Spain are still ahead of the rest, but interesting developments are also taking place in the Balkans.

BPL in developing countries
The developing world is also moving forward. Mexico has nine very ambitious regional plans and Venezuela and Costa Rica are also starting trials.

An interesting problem has arisen in Brazil. In that country 40% of electricity is illegally tapped off. Smart meters could assist in preventing this, but nothing is being done as it would be too disruptive for Brazil’s fragile social fabric.

BPL – better than wireless
BPL is also winning over wireless. During the last decade thousands of WiFi systems have been installed on campuses around the world. However, because of natural features (hills, trees) or building materials (concrete, steel), the original wireless deployment eventually often ended up twice the size of the initial plan, making it far more expensive than originally envisaged. Furthermore, the backhaul from these campuses through the fixed network is also an expensive exercise. Some of these systems in the USA are now being replaced by BPL. Nevertheless there will of course be plenty of room for both technologies to co-exist.

Smart Meter Summit – Sydney, 4 April 2007
On 4 April we will explore what smart meters can do for Australia. The Smart Meter Summit has attracted the attention of the Labor Opposition and they have indicated their willingness to show leadership on the issue. After their keynote address the Roundtable participants will discuss possible future directions for this technology.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 3:27 pm and is filed under From Paul's Desk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.