There was plenty of “whine” on November 4, or to be exact, at 4:55PM on November 3, when the CEA sent a 91 page document 5 minutes ahead of the 5:00PM deadline for comments on the California Energy Commission’s (CEC) proposed TV energy efficiency standards. In order to review this and other comments that arrived at this 11th hour, the CEC has postponed its hearing until November 18th.

The CEA comments oppose the proposed standards, citing that energy efficiency standards would increase the price of TVs. According to this industry association, the average digital TV uses the same electricity as two light bulbs – incandescent light bulbs. The average 42 inch LCD TV consumes 203 watts, and the average 42 inch plasma TV guzzles 271 watts. The average California home has three TVs. It appears that the CEA is strongly advocating for not only increased operating costs for consumers, but also construction of more expensive power plants and increased electricity rates to pay for increased power generation.

It’s a shame that the CEA can’t take the bold step of working cooperatively with the CEC to reduce consumers’ operating costs of TVs and reduce carbon footprints as well.

Smart Homes and HEMS in a Smart Grid

I attended a presentation by Vint Cerf, often called the “father of the Internet” last week, and part of his presentation covered sensors and actuators in homes, monitoring environmental conditions and sending alerts based on defined triggers. His example was his wine cellar. If the temperature goes above a threshold, sensors note the condition and send an alert to his mobile phone. An actuator could trigger a change in the air conditioning temperature to eliminate that threshold and alert.

This is the type of technology I want to see enabled on the one device I almost always forget to adjust before a trip – my hot water heater. Wouldn’t it be great if I could remotely set it to vacation mode and save energy and money – money that I could use for a future vacation? Wouldn’t it be even more wonderful if I had a powerful but easy-to-use Home Energy Management System (HEMS) that maintained a series of defined “Vacation mode” settings for my entire home? Instead of setting individual lamps on timers, having the ability to instruct my home to turn selected lights in selected rooms on and off on automated schedules would make my HEMS a handy preventive security system.

One way to achieve this is to make devices internet-enabled and addressable – maybe not all of them, but many of them. For utilities, one of the promises of the Smart Grid is the opportunity to expand and enrich their Demand Response (DR) programs. Through these DR programs, utilities can work with consumers to automatically power down pool pumps or refrigerator ice makers, remotely adjust HVAC temperatures up or down, and find other mutually agreeable actions that can pare down electricity demand at peak times. Some consumers are suspicious of any utility reach into their homes, so it will be very important for utilities to structure their DR programs so that consumers can override these automatic and/or remote controls – but at the price of higher peak electricity rates as a result of that ability to override.

There is another very important point about this future vision of a Smart Home in a Smart Grid – and it covers Internet security. Mr. Cerf pointed out that internet security is in definite need of research and development, and he’s right. If we are going to make a home truly Internet-enabled, as homeowners we’ll expect that our homes can’t be hacked with the unfortunate regularity that befalls our computers. HEMS solution providers need to consider appropriate security designs and processes into their software and hardware that consider worst-case scenarios. As we all know, one negative incident in the USA, one highly publicized negative incident, could set back the HEMS industry for years.

Check out the Global Smart Energy Bilateral Trade and Investment Opportunities event on November 13 in Monterey. The agenda is filled with Smart Grid sessions that cover national and global perspectives.

This forum, and others like it that encourage collaboration between universities, utilities, vendors, and governmental agencies, have the opportunity to get outside of traditional mindsets and to think differently about solutions that deliver on the vision of the Smart Grid – a fully bi-directional electric and communications network, as defined in the Smart Grid Dictionary.  The challenges are complex.  The existing grid in the USA was designed to meet the following expectations:

• deliver a one-way flow of electricity from centralized, utility-scale generation to a meter
• design processes and tools to manage electricity production from steady-state sources

The Smart Grid will include significant amounts of energy production from sources like wind and solar, which are clean and renewable, but stochastic sources.  (Stochastic means random variability, and that’s why the charts you see showing wind or solar production usually look like most stock market charts – which drives the agencies responsible for reliable electricity production crazy.)   It will also integrate distributed generation sources to the grid, which can range from neighborhood or campus-based sites to every residence with excess solar capacity.  Everything from modeling software and standards to the actual transmission and distribution equipment that handles bi-directional electricity flows has to be created and deployed.  In addition to these technology challenges, utilities also face questions from regulatory agencies with missions to protect rate-payers.  Even traditional processes will have to change to accommodate the changes coming with the Smart Grid. 

The UCLA WINSmartGrid Connection promises to be an interesting day –long session that explores promising technologies, the DOE and National Lab Smart Grid visions, and stimulus funding.   Their focus on wireless communications technologies, including RFID and RF sensors, is particularly intriguing, as well as their discussion on cap and trade impacts on the future Smart Grid.  The telemetry information that RFID can deliver has real possibilities in solutions that help manage the overall reliability of transmission and distribution in the Smart Grid.   It’s a good step in the direction of developing game-changing technologies. 

Game-changing Thinking

If you want some cheese with that “whine”, plan to attend the November 4 California Energy Commission public hearing to consider adoption of TV energy efficiency standards.   Will we hear more from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) about how these standards will hurt the California economy?  Probably.  Will we also get a reprise of the opinion that the government should really bail out electricity guzzling TV manufacturers with a cash for TV clunkers program?   No kidding – that was proposed by Panasonic.   

As previously blogged, there are currently 21 categories of appliances covered by California’s energy efficiency standards.  TVs are a worthy inclusion to that list – the average household has 4 of them!  Click here for more information about the hearing. 

It would be so refreshing and yes, game-changing, to see an industry association like the CEA thinking long term about the future of the planet instead of short-term about certain members’ bottom lines.  However, that doesn’t appear to be in their game plan.  My game plan is to put Panasonic and the other manufacturers that oppose the CEC proposal on my “Do not buy” list.  If sufficient numbers of consumers make energy efficiency part of their game plan, that will be game-changing thinking too. 

This concept is summed up as the Negawatt – defined in the Smart Grid Dictionary as the “watts of energy saved through a reduction in energy use or increase in energy efficiency.  It is the greenest form of energy.” 

California is a leader in Negawatts.  As previously noted in my October 12 blog, the California Energy Commission (CEC) has defined energy efficiency standards for appliances sold and used in California since 1976.  The results of those actions are that per person, annual electricity consumption in California has remained steady at 7,000 kWh while electricity consumption has risen to 12,000 kWh in the rest of the USA. 

What this means is that Californians are not wasting money on electricity-guzzling appliances.  However, 35 million devices are omitted from that appliance list – California TVs.  The CEC wants to remedy this gap in the standards with regulations for TVs sold and used in California.  Docket # 09-AAER-1C Appliance Efficiency Regulations Pertaining to Television Efficiency contains the information about the regulation under consideration.

This standards proposal is facing fierce opposition from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).  In keeping with Halloween, they are filling editorial pages with fear and gloom – this regulation will kill retail jobs. 

Could an EnergyGuide label, which would identify annual operating  costs (electricity consumption) for a TV and also rank that TV’s overall energy efficiency on a scale of best to least efficient force Californians to drive across state borders to buy “bootleg” TVs from Nevada, Oregon, or Arizona?  According to this logic, Californians must be doing this already for all of the other appliances covered by CEC EnergyGuide standards since 1976. 

Today I counted 26 appliance stores within a 10 mile radius of my Bay Area zip code, ranging from small businesses to large national chains.  Californians are still buying appliances locally, and perhaps they appreciate that their annual operating costs for these appliances are lower as a result of the energy efficiency standards.

The CEA opposition does raise a couple of questions.  Why oppose it?  Over 1000 TV sets already qualify for the standards that would be imposed in 2011.  Some manufacturers, like Vizio, support the standards.  The CEA claims that an energy efficiency standard would “stifle innovation”.   Wouldn’t it also promote innovation in designs that reduced energy consumption, innovations that could probably be extended to other uses too?

May the most energy-efficient manufacturers win – because it’s a triple win.   It means more Negawatts out there, it means reduced need for more power plants and it means reduced TV operating costs for every consumer.

The Smart Grid takes energy efficiency to new levels of savings, as noted in an October 20 press release.  Manufacturers like GE and Whirlpool are participating in the recently launched Smart Green Grid Initiative (SGGI), a collaborative industry association that demonstrates the role of smart grid technologies and practices in the achievement of climate change goals.  One of the ways to do that is through energy efficiency and smart appliances that can communicate with the electrical grid.  I didn’t see the CEA on that list of enlightened manufacturers and industry associations.

And with Halloween in mind – like many other appliances, TVs are energy vampires.  Even when you turn them off, they are still drawing power.  The only way to cut the power completely is to unplug them, or put them on power strips that have “kill” switches for complete cessation of power draws.  You can buy dumb power strips for as little as $6 and see an ROI in as little as a month.  If you do have some devices that MUST be drawing electricity 24X7, there are intelligent power strips available that accommodate those needs too.  The bottom line is that these are simple steps for residential electricity customers to save some money, generate Negawatts, and reduce carbon footprints.