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| ZigBee Alliance | www.zigbee.org | Copyright 2008 |
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ZigBee
Today The ZigBee Smart Energy public application profile continues to expand as Detroit Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric recently announced contracts to launch advanced metering programs. ZigBee Smart Energy empowers utility customers to participate in demand response and energy efficiency programs, while supporting the ongoing development and deployment of the “smart grid.” Based on current plans, more than 12 million ZigBee equipped smart meters will become a part of homes around the U.S. in the very near future. I look forward to announcing more ZigBee Smart Energy certified products that are specifically designed to meet this growing market and environmental need. During this last month, we also announced an important initiative to expand ZigBee Smart Energy into the powerline segment by working with the HomePlug Powerline Alliance. A group of utilities led by American Electric Power, Consumers Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Reliant Energy, San Diego Gas and Electric, and Southern California Edison will work with Alliance experts to develop a common application layer integrated solution for advanced metering infrastructure and home area networks (HAN). The goal of this venture is to provide utilities with both wireless and wired HAN industry standards and provide the flexibility utilities need to implement AMI and smart metering programs. The Alliance new member growth continues at a very rapid pace, with 55 new members joining so far this year. We expect this growth to continue, further expanding ZigBee’s value across the wireless sensors and control space. With so many members joining the Alliance, we have recently simplified searches and increased the information available on ZigBee members. Now you can find expanded information on member products and solutions, conduct a member search by geography or area of specialty, plus obtain contact information (when available) from one source – www.ZigBee.org. Visit the Our Members page to view all participating ZigBee members, and click here to use the new search tool. I look forward to seeing many of you at the Vancouver Member Meeting October 6th-9th and at AMR China, October 21-23, 2008. Best regards, |
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UTILITIES, ZIGBEE® AND HOMEPLUG® JOIN FORCES TO CREATE WIRED HAN STANDARD ZigBee Smart Energy to Be Expanded for Wired Use on HomePlug San Ramon, Calif. – August 25, 2008 – Today utilities led by American Electric Power, Consumers Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Reliant Energy, Sempra, and Southern California Edison are working with the ZigBee® Alliance and the HomePlug® Powerline Alliance to develop a common application layer integrated solution for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and home area networks (HAN). Using the robust capabilities of the ZigBee Smart Energy public application profile as a baseline, the three groups will expand the application layer and enable it to run on HomePlug technology, providing utilities with both wireless and wired HAN industry standards to select from when implementing new AMI programs. Energy management programs that encourage load shifting and energy conservation can allow customers to save money and reduce their environmental impact. Creating a unified solution using the leading open wireless and wired standards will expand the development and certification of devices such as thermostats, pool pumps, water heaters and other high energy use devices ideally suited for connection to a HAN. In May 2008, the ZigBee Alliance certified a number of interoperable ZigBee Smart Energy products from a dozen companies. For a list of ZigBee Smart Energy certified products, visit: our website “This initiative will provide seamless application integration using ZigBee or HomePlug devices, providing the flexibility utilities need when implementing AMI and smart metering programs,” said Paul De Martini, vice president at Southern California Edison. “Mainstream market adoption of a common technology accelerates our ability to empower our customers to manage their energy usage."” “The integration of a common application layer across these technologies will allow a common certification process which is critical for plug-and-play interoperability,” said Chris Knudsen, director of PG&E’s technology innovation center. “Without such integration it will not be possible to scale energy efficiency applications and services.” “ZigBee Smart Energy was developed by utility companies, product manufacturers and technology suppliers so it makes perfect sense to leverage that collaboration,” said Bob Heile, ZigBee Alliance chairman. “Expediting the rollout of energy management and efficiency programs that help everyone better manage their energy use is our common goal and the ZigBee Alliance is proud to play a key role in this process.” Providing connectivity between utilities and consumers is an ongoing initiative for the HomePlug Alliance. “With more than 20 million HomePlug enabled products in use on six continents, HomePlug technology is the leading global standard for power-line networks,” said Rob Ranck, HomePlug Alliance president. “As utilities and access providers aggressively deploy HomePlug technology in applications around the world for electric grid management, automatic meter reading applications and demand response, BPL and Command and Control applications continue to be a driving force for the Alliance.” ZigBee Smart Energy – The Standard for Energy Management and
Efficiency ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works About the HomePlug Powerline Alliance |
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| ZigBee member success stories
Daintree Networks with ZigBee, Teaming Up to Certify Smart Energy The world is facing astounding population growth with our current population at 6.6 billion and a forecast of 9.2 billion people on the earth by the year 2050. With this huge population growth comes an unprecedented demand for energy. This challenge has utilities initiating new business plans and strategies that will address energy needs not for just five or 10 years, but 50 years down the road. One such strategy is the implementation of standards-based, certified systems that provide for smarter, more efficient energy use. While many companies can offer utilities products providing energy efficiency, only those companies who offer certified products and systems built to a global standard are becoming a part of the utilities’ business plan. Certified products and systems provide utilities the assurance of interoperability and reliability – key elements to longevity. LS Industrial Systems is one such company that provides utilities in the U.S. with a ZigBee Smart Energy product through their ZigBee® certified LK Series Electric Meters. As a member of the ZigBee Alliance, LS Industrial Systems, an LG company, clearly knew the benefits ZigBee Certified products bring to the table. They began their ZigBee certification process with the help of another ZigBee member, Daintree Networks, a leading provider of tools for developing, testing, commissioning, and maintaining ZigBee devices and networks. “Daintree was instrumental in helping us achieve ZigBee Smart Energy certification for our LK Series Electric Meters,” said Jeongjoon Lee, LS Industrial Systems program manager. Lee added, “As you can imagine, there is a great deal of work involved in getting a ZigBee product certified. The SNA was like another member of the team, providing expert analysis and troubleshooting and reducing the workload on the rest of us. Daintree’s support team also provided the assistance we needed to ensure we would succeed with certification.” Daintree’s flagship testing software, Sensor Network Analyzer (SNA), is a crucial part in the ZigBee Alliance’s interoperability events and product certification programs including recent smart energy certification product testing by two separate test houses. It provides ZigBee Alliance members with the primary platform-independent means of visualizing, recording and verifying conformance to ZigBee specifications and certification tests. SNA is compatible with an extensive range of third-party semiconductor development kits, including those from Atmel, Ember, Freescale, Integration Associates, Jennic, NEC Electronics, OKI, One RF Technology, Renesas, and Texas Instruments. ZigBee members developing, installing or managing devices or networks based on ZigBee benefit by using SNA’s rich collection of tools.
SNA provides unique visualization that helps ZigBee designers and developers by graphically viewing devices joining and leaving the network, packet routes, endpoints, and bindings. Being able to watch the network in action creates a more thorough understanding of what is going on and helps identify potential or actual problems. Users can also drill-down to find greater detail about individual events, take advantage of tools including powerful filters and full protocol decodes. Daintree’s SNA stays current with ZigBee standards by adding support for new public application profiles and enhanced security. This helps members achieve ZigBee certification more easily and helps get products to market faster. By requiring ZigBee Smart Energy Certified products, utilities gain third-party verification of product interoperability for worry-free operation. Utilities can focus on continuously monitoring power usage and informing consumers in real-time about peak and off-peak pricing options. Both consumers and utilities gain the ability to remotely or automatically adjust energy usage by leveraging ZigBee home area networks by making adjustments to how power is used. For example, by adjusting a heating or cooling thermostat slightly, consumers can become more energy efficient and save money. “Our customers are working on a number of very different and very exciting projects,” said Bill Wood, CEO of Daintree. “From smart energy to smart homes, from commercial building automation to inventory control, from farming and agriculture to preparing for interplanetary travel, it is truly inspiring to see the number of different ways people are taking full-advantage of ZigBee. When they see the long list of benefits from using ZigBee, including its low power usage, self-healing mesh networking, reliability, robustness, and security, the decision to use ZigBee is immediate.”
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| ZigBee member success stories
Siemens With ZigBee; Driving Volvo Towards the Future The need to reduce greenhouse gases while becoming more energy efficient is a worldwide challenge that industrial plants are addressing aggressively. More than one-third of all the energy used in the United States is utilized in industrial plants. U.S. manufacturers also face an increasingly competitive environment, and need ways to reduce production costs without negatively affecting the yield or the quality of their products. Adding to this challenge, uncertain energy prices in today’s marketplace are negatively affecting manufacturers’ once predictable earnings. Energy efficiency has become not only an important environmental strategy, but also a sound business strategy. Volvo faced many of these modern-day challenges with its 400,000 square-foot assembly plant built in 1977. With about two-thirds of their entire budget spent on electricity, they wanted an energy efficient solution implemented quickly. They also wanted to create a more productive environment by improving the safety and comfort in the plant. They called Siemens to help them chart a progressive energy course for the future. Siemens immediately proposed their APOGEE® Wireless System using ZigBee® technology. Over 30 years old, the Volvo assembly plant needed a modern building automation system (BAS) that would improve the working environment while increasing energy efficiency. The outdated plant was entirely inefficient in managing their energy, with multiple locally-operated, standalone HVAC systems that were frequently operating at the wrong times. A traditional hard-wire system to network these systems would have required running thousands of feet of wire and conduit between controllers mounted on different pieces of equipment. With 30 foot high ceilings in most of the facility, wiring would have been significantly more difficult and expensive. Additionally, running wiring and conduit had the potential of causing significant interruptions to the production lines along with safety hazards. However, until these standalone systems could be networked and operated remotely from a central workstation, any improvements would be severely limited. The answer was to network all of the controllers wirelessly using leading-edge ZigBee mesh technology. The APOGEE Wireless System utilizes leading-edge ZigBee mesh technology that is reliable, flexible and versatile. Once installed, this new system wirelessly networked unit heaters, exhaust fans, AC units and lighting through 92 wireless field network level controllers that now communicate through remote workstations in multiple locations. The system is now scheduled to operate at certain times or as environmental conditions dictate. The wireless networking was implemented quickly and accommodated Volvo’s schedule and budget. The self-forming, self-healing ZigBee network ensures reliability by using new routing algorithms that create multiple redundant paths of communication, enabling cost-saving energy efficiency. With this APOGEE system, Volvo was able to overcome the barriers to technology upgrades and realize the benefits of a modern BAS. “Our customers continue to rely on us to provide innovative building automation technologies that deliver true value to their operations,” said Jeff Raimo, Siemens wireless product manager. “While the potential of wireless should be obvious, the technology only has value to our customers if proven and ready for the rigors of real-world applications such as those seen in industrial facilities like Volvo’s.” APOGEE Wireless became the cost-effective solution to achieve the Volvo’s energy efficiency goal. Since installation, this 400,000 square foot plant has seen 30% energy savings. And, the total time to complete the wireless retrofit, six weeks, was considerably shorter and safer than the many months it would have taken with a hard-wired installation. “We not only realized significant reductions in energy usage and operating costs, but we were able to lower project costs required to complete the needed retrofit. Best of all, there was minimal, if any, disruptions to our production lines”, said Marty Breedlove, Volvo facility manager. APOGEE Wireless is now found not only in industrial settings, but also office buildings, schools, universities and hospitals across North America.
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| ZigBee member success stories
Energate Implements ZigBee Smart Energy to Balance the Needs of Utilities and Empower Consumers Around the world, energy markets are being stressed to their limits during peak demand periods. Fluctuating power flows and increasing price volatility add to the unease about future energy supply security and also increase the potential for a system reliability disaster. To reduce peak energy consumption and the risk of taxing the existing power infrastructure to the point of blackouts, many energy services companies are investigating how to provide their consumers with demand response programs. Energate, a leading provider of home energy management controls, systems, and services for the energy, HVAC, and home automation markets is now offering a solution with its ZigBee® Smart Energy Certified Pioneer Z100 smart thermostats. Demand response programs specifically focus on reducing energy usage through energy automation in the customer premises. Energate’s Pioneer Z100 smart thermostats not only reduce energy demand but also measure this reduction. Past demand response programs nationwide in the U.S. have shown the ability to reduce peak energy demand by 30,000 MW, which is equivalent to reducing the need for up to 250 peaking plants, eliminating the burning of 680 billion cubic feet of gas per year and the release of 31,000 tons of nitrogen oxide emissions. Among the first companies to receive official ZigBee Smart Energy certification, Energate provides seamless interoperability with smart grid technology to improve energy management and efficiency. By being ZigBee-compliant, utilities can be assured that Energate's smart thermostat is interoperable with ZigBee-enabled Advanced Metering Infrastructure, Demand Response systems, and other home energy management solutions, providing utilities great flexibility to meet their needs and the needs of their consumers. The ZigBee Smart Energy public application profile offers utility companies a global open standard for implementing secure, easy-to-use wireless home area networks for managing energy. However, for demand response programs to be truly successful, utilities need "the keys to the house." Many consumers will only grant such access if certain important conditions are met. Consumers want to save on their utility bills with easy to use, proven, innovative, intelligent, secure and reliable energy solutions that seamlessly integrate into the complexities of advanced metering infrastructure. But most of all, this sophisticated technology must be easy to understand and even easier to use. From a homeowner’s perspective, Energate’s ZigBee Certified Pioneer Z100 smart thermostat delivers consumer empowerment through support of overrides, the use of plain language, multi-lingual interfaces and context-sensitive help screens allowing consumers to understand and control where energy is being used, at what cost, and how it can be reduced. Once configured, the Pioneer Z100’s advanced climate control algorithms ensure comfort is maintained consistently and efficiently. It also provides features and information that empower consumers to manage their energy use more effectively. The Pioneer Z100 smart thermostat is a part of the ZigBee Smart Energy Certified Product portfolio. ZigBee Smart Energy enables wireless communication between utility companies and common household devices such as smart thermostats and appliances. It improves energy efficiency by allowing consumers to manage their energy consumption more precisely using automation and near real-time information while having the ability to choose from a large global ecosystem of companies supplying interoperable products. It also helps utility companies implement new advanced metering and demand response programs to drive greater energy management and efficiency, while responding to changing government requirements. "We're in the midst of an exciting and significant change in the energy industry as a growing number of utilities roll out smart grid technology," said Jorge Deligiannis, chief technology officer at Energate. "Given the range and sophistication of this technology, it is critical that we help develop and embrace industry standards to ensure security and interoperability. Our ZigBee Certified Pioneer Z100 smart thermostat provides seamless two-way communication, allowing utilities to monitor and manage energy use while giving consumers the tools they need to improve their own energy-use practices."
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