The utilities I talk to think they can do theft detection well
enough. I believe the revenue meter on the side of the house is involved—but
they clearly don’t want to tell me more. They’ve been doing theft
detection for a long time.
I expect utilities to only offer incentives for retail DR
programs where they can assure themselves, well enough, that the consumer has
upheld his side of the bargain.
The utilities have gone to great lengths to authenticate the ESI
and the thermostat or pool pump control device. It fits in 128 KB of
Flash on an 8 bit processor, though they use ECC in order to keep the keys and
certificates small. Plus they use ECC to reduce the bits on the slow wire
from the meter to the head end.
I’m not convinced they can do theft detection, other than
in a gross sort of way, via the meter. Like the people driving back from
Canada with a high-flow toilet in the trunk of their car shortly after the
low-flow toilets were mandated in the US, I keep envisioning people returning
to L.A. from a gambling junket in Las Vegas and stopping at a Home Depot in
Nevada to pick up a regular programmable thermostat to wire in parallel the Air
Conditioning terminals on the PCT.
Best,
B.O. December 18, 2009
Robert Old
Siemens Industry, Inc.
Building Technologies
1000 Deerfield Pkwy.
Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-4513
Tel.: +1 (847) 941-5623
Skype: bobold2
bob.old@siemens.com
www.siemens.com
I think this quote I extracted
from one of Ed's comment in the chain is, perhaps, foundational.
"Having a device
communicate its response back between the domains is of little value unless the
trust in the response is equivalent to that of a sub meter in that the response
can be used for billing." Ed Cazalet
If you look at the costs
involved to having a device equal a revenue grade AMI meter in reliability,
security, and be abile to maintain the verification of the response, will it
have a valid cost/benefit for anything but very large loads?
The other buring question is,
can it be spoofed for financial gain? The ATTACHED IMAGE IS A SPOOF sent
to me from a friend. But it makes an obvious point. The position is that
a DR should be verifiable and impact standard energy measurment and billing
methods. Otherwise it’s success and verification may always be in
question.
Enjoy!
Gale
Original Message-----
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