As published on Next Generation Power & Energy's website:
Smart Meters Made Intelligent With Carina
The utility industry’s aggressive deployment of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Metering Data Management (MDM) systems has led to the accelerated development of a multitude of vendor (AMI/MDM) solutions. Utility CEOs are now facing stressful decisions with concerns about obsolescence, integration with legacy systems and impacts on long term dedicated employees.
The good news is that the AMI/MDM movement is enhancing utilities customer focus, consumer sensitivity and compliance with the 2005 Energy Act. The industry challenge is to meet specific utility company technology requirements that vary broadly based on their existing technology infrastructure. Vendors with flexible and adaptive solutions are meeting the challenge. NGP&E asked Jay Newkirk, Carina Technology, Inc.’s President and CEO to discuss the importance of flexible and adaptable AMI/MDM solutions and to discuss those issues relative to the emerging utility industry pay-as-you-go or pre-pay requirements and Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) deployments aimed at offering utilities alternative triple-play value added benefits, enhancing utility smart grid initiatives and providing a significant broadband communications back-haul for data and information flow and data mining and management.
Flexible Smart Metering hardware solutions:
The pressure is on the utility vendor industry to design and perfect flexible metering hardware systems that can respond to the utility customer base whose states of technology adoption vary widely. Carina Technology, Inc. (Carina) whose by-line is “we make smart meters intelligent” made a decision to make flexibility and adaptability the cornerstones of the company. Its smart metering/smart grid hardware solutions are not based on any one technology or existing meter manufacturer. The core technology, CarinaPointTM, is a collar that sits between the meter base and any digital meter. The electronics consists of a universal board with plug-and-play functionality allowing for flexible and adaptable communication solutions. Other plug-and-play boards provide Zigbee, 900 MHz or HomePlug capability to talk inside the home for pre-pay and demand-side management applications. Additional flexibility is designed into the electronics allowing for remote firmware upgrades and functional modification as utility customer requirements grow and change over time. The importance of this kind of adaptability and flexibility again rests solidly with the utility leadership as they make career impacting decisions for AMI/MDM deployment expenditures.
Flexible Smart Metering software solutions:
Equally important, flexibility is needed in the integration of smart metering software with existing and/or legacy systems. Many early Automated Meter Reading (AMR)/AMI) systems weren’t integration projects at all, but were expensive replacement systems with fixed solutions lacking flexibility or at best offering expensive upgrades and modifications over time. The utilities are now looking for vendors like Carina and their CarinaXchangeTM software suite that can provide adaptive software; web-based systems written in open languages like MultiSpeak protocol that is easily integrated with existing systems. Beyond that, adaptive software provides the end-user-control for screen views and customized report generation so the utility can, through this design approach, customize AMI output and reports without costly and time consuming basic software modifications. The progressive vendors are developing interfaces to existing utility systems allowing a migration approach to adopting this technology. An example of such an interface which Carina has deployed is interfacing new smart metering data with an existing billing system. This allows the new remote meter-reads to successfully integrate into existing meter read billing systems. Providing this flexible integration approach optimizes the utility’s technology migration over time as it works to achieve a full AMI deployment.
Pre-pay systems with flexible designs can solve the disconnect challenge and more:
Pay-as-you-go or pre-pay utility systems are the ultimate solution to the expense of disconnecting and reconnecting non-paying consumers. While remote disconnect devices like Carina’s automated meter disconnect (CarinaAMDTM) save time and money, the real solution is to offer “money management challenged” customers new options to pay their energy bill, thus eliminating the disconnect/reconnect problem all together.
Again, flexible hardware and software designs become the key. To successfully support a utility’s initiative to deploy a pre-pay solution, integrating the solution into a legacy operational environment requires the vendor system to adapt to the ongoing day-to-day activity, and for sure not to force the utility decision maker to shut down an existing legacy system, and replace it with another proprietary “soon-to-be-legacy” system. Flexible hardware systems like the CarinaPoint FlexPayTM offer utility companies a variety of data capture and communication options back to the AMI/MDM operation center. Again, the hardware system must provide flexibility first followed by software that integrates into the existing systems with interfaces into billing systems, outage management systems, GIS and others.
In addition, flexible pre-pay deployments offer a variety of inside-the-home communication options. The FlexPayTM device, for example, has an adaptable daughter-board design allowing for Zigbee, 900 MHz or HomePlug connectivity inside, not only for pre-pay applications, but for demand-side-management and other “to be identified” inside the home applications.
Utility industry fiber-to-the-home initiatives:
Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) is becoming an expected amenity as consumers are demanding high-speed Internet, voice-over-IP and high-definition video viewing options. New home development construction projects have FTTH designed into the site-prep as a matter of course. Progressive utilities recognize the value of tapping into this significant broadband resource for AMI/MDM deployment. The challenge for utilities has been the decision to step up and deploy the fiber themselves, wait for the community or municipality to fund a deployment, or to partner with them. The obvious value to the utility is a high-speed two-way communication network for any and all future utility customer service applications. The communication costs are minimized since the value proposition is based on triple-play revenue not additional costs for utility AMI/MDM initiatives.
A case in point is the Bristol Tennessee Essential Services (BTES) FTTH project. Here the utility took matters into their own hands. BTES CEO Dr. Michael R. Browder, the Staff and Board of Directors evaluated the case for the utility to deploy FTTH across the BTES service area to provide triple-play options for their consumer base. In this case the local cable and Internet industry was not responding to the growing demand in the area so the utility leadership and its Board stepped up. Part of Dr. Browder’s presentation to the Board was “we can make save money for the customer and give better service.” So the FTTH system deployment was launched and paved the way for the BTES AMI/MDM initiatives.
During the FTTH $27M deployment, BTES searched for a cost effective way to power the optical network terminal’s (ONT’s) and to connect the meter to the ONT’s for the AMI deployment. After failing to find an existing industry solution and through a previous relationship with the Carina VP for Sales, Dr. Browder found the CarinaPointTM collar and approached the company for a solution. The flexibility of the collar design led to the BTES solution and the Carina Ethernet Metering Device (CarinaEMDTM). Dr. Browder stated recently at the Tennessee Fiber Optic Communities meeting, “We had been looking for a company that had the ability to provide us an Automated Metering Infrastructure solution consistent with our fiber deployment and to do it within our projected budget. We are impressed with Carina’s capabilities and extensive utility experience, product design and integration capabilities, and are confident that this will be a successful venture.”
The hardware was only the first step in the overall BTES AMI/MDM deployment. Integration of the back-office software, CarinaXchangeTM, into the existing operation required a data system interface, part of the CarinaXchangeTM suite, allowing strategic hardware deployment over time resulting in minimal utility operational disruption as the hardware systems were deployed. The deployment is on-going and plans are to complete the full deployment within three years.
Summary:
As utility companies embrace technology and achieve compliance with the requirements of the 2005 Energy Act, solutions to AMI and MDM system deployments will require utility vendor’s offerings to move away from proprietary communication systems and “all or nothing” hardware and software system deployments that don’t have strategic and surgical integration features. This has opened the door for smaller companies with more agile and adaptable system designs and design teams whose focus is just that, adaptive and flexible hardware and software solutions that can be strategically deployed, customized to the individual utility needs and objectives taking into account their state of technology integration and deployment.
About Carina: Carina Technology, Inc. is a Huntsville-AL-based technology hardware and software firm that provides Utility Information Solutions through its patented CarinaPoint™ Solution. Carina enables energy providers to manage operations more efficiently through applications such as Meter Data Management, remote meter reading, Demand Side Management, & remote disconnect/reconnect. More information about Carina can be found at www.carinatek.com.
CONTACT:
Laura Pepper
Carina Technology, Inc.
Phone: 256.704.0422 x106
Fax: 256.704.0366
lpepper@carinatek.com
www.carinatek.com
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