Just Say No to Big Brother’s Smart Meters by Orlean Koehle
about controlling us and charging all of us more money to finance cap and trade and the agendas that are in-play right now. Personally, I am not interested in giving up any more freedom than is currently being taken away on a daily basis right now.”
At the end of the following article, it reveals the wired possibilities, but it also reveals some of the groups partnering together with Silver Springs to produce Smart Grid software technologies:
Silver Spring reveals ZigBee development partner, Monday, March 2, 2009:
Silver Spring Networks, a leading smart grid technology firm, announced on February 26 that it has partnered with Exegin Technologies to develop ZigBee based software applications. ZigBee is a wireless standard that allows smart grid components to communicate intelligently
without human intervention. The protocol has gained a lot of momentum for use in smart grids because of the very low power requirements, low bandwidth, and low cost. Because of these factors, ZigBee is rapidly emerging as a favourite for transmitting information from smart meters to monitoring and controlling equipment in the home. Silver Spring has performed well for a start-up company.
It has signed up major utility development.
companies including American Electric Power, Florida Power & Light, and Pacific Gas & Electric, among others, to deploy its Smart Meter technology that is built around ZigBee technology. Partnering with Silver Spring puts Exegin in a leadership of smart grid technology The working relationship began in September of last year.
announcement made it official that Silver Spring was going to license software from Exegin built upon the ZigBee PRO protocol within its ZigBee radios that make up a critical component its smart grid technology. According to James Pace, senior director of business development at Silver Spring, the “vast
majority” of network interface cards (NICs) that the company installs into Smart Meters are ZigBee radios, implying that Exegin’s innovation will be gaining significant share of the market rather quickly.
Pacific Gas & Electric has already installed more than 150,000 Smart Meters that feature technology from Silver Spring. By 2011 the utility giant plans to have a million installed. Silver Spring says that by the end of this year it will have 2 million Silver Spring-enabled Smart Meters installed. Both Exegin and Silver Spring are members of the ZigBee Alliance – a group dedicated to the
development of the protocol. The official mission of the ZigBee Alliance is “to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard.” Pace said that Exegin was chosen as a partner because of its expertise in “bridging and
gateway technologies.” This is important because ZigBee is competing with other networking protocols some of them wired and others wireless. The ZigBee Alliances has insisted upon an open platform in the development of its technology so that it will be freely available to any developer who wishes to build upon it. Other companies working through the HomePlug Powerline Alliance are developing
communications over power lines. Echelon Corporation is one of these, among others. The ZigBee Alliance has been working with HomePlug since September of last year to create a communications protocol that will work for both technologies.
In some areas, such as apartment buildings or other large multi-family buildings, transmitting communications over power lines makes sense because metering devices
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