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The best minds in electricity . . . have a plan: every node in the power network of the future will be awake, responsive, adaptive, price-smart, eco-sensitive, real-time, flexible, humming - and interconnected with everything else . . . Call it The Energy Web. Wired Magazine
July, 2001

We are witnessing today a new era in power technologies in power generation, distribution, and end customer energy management and load control. Most parts of the world are either going through or will soon go through a restructuring of the electricity and gas industries to put in place a market structure and regulatory framework to enhance competition and allow for fair play in an open, competitive market. With steep increases in the prices for electricity and natural gas in the US in 2000 and 2001, many commercial and industrial customers became acutely aware that they had no way to track energy usage or cost on anything close to a real time basis. Instead, except for the largest industrial users, data was available only after-the-fact, when the Utility sent out its bills. There exists a largely unfulfilled need for a high value, low-cost solution that provides energy efficiencies, real time metering, and rich functionality such as power quality monitoring. These solutions should further be able to tie into building automation and control systems so as to tailor energy consumption with energy pricing. The ideal solution would consist of an integrated energy management system that is capable of monitoring and control. A preliminary market survey for such technologies yields a plethora of products from several different manufacturers, but none that can be easily deployed on a wide scale or can be operated and maintained inexpensively. Emerging Technology – Embedded mesh networks
New technologies based on Radio Frequency (RF) mesh networking promise an ideal solution with high functionality and low cost. RF mesh networking of multiple sensors in a facility, enable industrial and commercial customers to reduce energy costs through profiling energy usage and developing plans that help avoid demand charges, reduce energy consumption, and improve business processes such as instantaneous and efficient controls of HVAC/insulation and lighting systems. The reduction in energy cost can be achieved by a demand side strategy. In order to implement a demand side strategy, customers need to be able to:

• Monitor and set threshold alerts prior to the peak demands and detect abnormal conditions.
• Perform proactive utility rate comparisons for each site and implement rate structures suitable for each site.
• Access lower cost competitive energy sources through efficient procurement processes that save direct energy costs and reduce energy procurement costs.
• Aggregate and analyze energy-and industrial or business process related data over multiple facilities.

A RF mesh network facilitates closing the loop between energy management and building automation. It simultaneously improves building processes while reducing energy costs through identification and timing of energy intensive processes to manage a customer’s load profile against both the business needs and energy pricing parameters.

New Approach to integrated energy management and information systems
Embedded RF networks are designed to allow the ad-hoc addition of monitoring and control points without otherwise modifying the network software or components. Additional cost is limited to the installed cost of the additional points. The various sensors (nodes) form a self-organizing, self-healing wireless mesh network that is managed through a gateway. The gateway also maintains status information for each node and allows an operator at the back-office Network Management Center to check on individual nodes. The gateway can be connected to the back-office through a variety of back-haul mechanisms such as the Internet, phone lines or cellular devices. The Network Manager software at the back office provides a graphical user interface to access the gateway, check on node status, generate data reports from the node, etc. It also allows scheduled periodic collection of all data from the gateway and storage in a central database. The salient points of RF mesh networks that have made it attractive are:

1. Speed: Full interval data can be collected from different nodes in near real time,
2. Cost-effectiveness: The self-organizing network makes for extreme ease of installation; the usage of license-free spectrum eliminates transaction costs for individual nodes; and the use of relatively short-range radios coupled with a large-scale network allows for low cost hardware.
3. Robustness: The architecture of the system builds in local storage at both the nodes and the gateway and integrates intelligent recovery mechanisms ensuring that data will not be lost even in the event of disruption of communications
4. Completeness: An integrated framework for different sensors such as electric, gas and water meters and HVAC controllers provides truly centralized control and management.

RF mesh networks have been installed for small and large-scale networks ranging from 50 nodes to over 3000 nodes for its customers. The customers are experiencing a full ROI between 3-18 months depending on the specific application. RF mesh networks provide an effective way to achieve efficiencies and control costs for end customers and enable intelligent decision making in real time. Embedded RF networks will be the key to intelligent energy information systems in the future in both the commercial and residential markets.