Conserving Energy with No Watt Left Behind

Facilities managers for industrial and commercial sites want to develop detailed electrical consumption profiles of their electrical and electromechanical loads, including expensive physical plant for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and equipment for manufacturing and production. This information is essential in order to understand and optimize energy consumption, to detect and solve equipment failures and problems, and to facilitate predictive maintenance of electromechanical loads. As energy costs rise, residential customers are also developing a growing interest in understanding the magnitude and impact of their electrical consumption quickly, easily, and informatively. Conventional sub-metering of individual loads to detect problems and conduct energy score-keeping has long been costly and inconvenient. A nagging problem for over two decades has been that these costs increase swiftly as data requirements become increasingly complex: ... the high cost of equipment continues to limit the amount of [usage] data utilities can collect. Additional drawbacks of the equipment now available for collection of end-use load survey data range from their cost, reliability, and flexibility to intrusion into the customer's activities and premises [1]. Computational power and data transmission capabilities for commercial monitoring and control systems have out-paced the problem of putting sensors in all the right places. Various kinds of high-speed data networks provide convenient remote access to control inputs and system operating information for embedded control and monitoring systems. Similarly, microprocessors and associated technologies for these systems have achieved astounding price/performance ratios. interpretation of a vast collection of sensors – a daunting proposition even if the sensors are mass produced, micro-miniature, and individually inexpensive. There is a need for flexible, inexpensive metering technologies that can be deployed in many different monitoring scenarios. Individual loads may be expected to compute information about their power consumption. They may also be expected to communicate information about their power consumption through wired or wireless means. Switch gear like circuit breaker panels may soon be expected to provide detailed submetering information for different loads on different breakers or clusters of breakers and controls. New utility meters will need to communicate bidirectionally, and may need to compute parameters of power flow not commonly assessed by most current meters. The U.S. Department of Energy has identified " sensing and measurement " as one of the " five fundamental technologies " essential for driving the creation of a " Smart Grid " [2]. Consumers will need " simple, accessible.. . , rich, useful information …