Cisco’s Smart Grid Team is excited to support the Wireless Smart Utility Network Alliance (Wi-SUN). Lionel Chocron, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Connected Energy Networks Business, will be representing Cisco on the Wi-Sun board of directors. Cisco will be joining at the promoter level and the entire team is looking forward to helping drive the development of interoperable Field Area Networks (FAN) for utility applications.

Field Area Networks today are often closed,  proprietary systems and generally just supporting a single service. As a result, they do not support interoperability across multiple vendors or take advantage of the decades of networking expertise available within the Internet Protocol suite (IP).

By supporting Wi-SUN, Cisco will help drive the technical definition for standards based, multi service, secure, and scalable Field Area Networks. The Field Area Networks will support important utility use cases including Automatic Metering Infrastructure, Outage Management, and Distribution Automation.

The Wi-SUN defined Field Area Network will be based upon the IP protocol suite, with the initial release based on IEEE 802.15.4g PHY and 802.15.4e MAC wireless mesh technologies.  Usage of the IP protocol suite will provide many benefits, including the ability to support additional PHY/MAC technologies in the future.

Our team will further assist in the development of certification testing and “plug-fests” for regions around the world. This will ensure international interoperability between multiple vendors implementing the Wi-SUN defined Field Area Network.

“We are very pleased to be joining the Wi-SUN alliance, and look forward to collaborating with our industry partners to bring interoperable, standards based utility Field Area Networks to reality,” said Lionel Chocron, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Connected Energy Networks Business Unit.

Other companies who are promoters of the Wi-Sun alliance include:

Further details about the Wi-SUN Alliance can be found here

Cisco Connected Grid products and solution information is available here

Tags: Connected Energy, IPv6, M2M, Smart Grid

Enabling commercial, industrial and residential customers to better monitor and manage their energy consumption is a key benefit of a Smart Grid.  As part of their grid modernization initiatives, utilities are providing information and incentives to end consumers. These include visibility to real-time energy consumption, as well as variable price and demand response signals that communicate with energy management devices and smart appliances.

This will drive more low power, often battery powered, wireless and wired energy sensors and actuators in the consumer premises.  To date, this space is populated with several PHY/MAC specific, non-standardized protocol stacks which do not interoperate.  To avoid multiple separate consumer networks a PHY/MAC agnostic solution is needed and this solution is best based upon open IP standards.

The ZigBee Alliance’s ZigBee IP (ZIP) standard is a first definition of an open standards based IPv6 stack for smart objects. The effort has made significant progress to bring IPv6 network protocols over 802.15.4 wireless mesh networks to reality.

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Tags: Connected Energy, IPv6, M2M, Smart Grid

Cisco recently sat down with Richard Creegan of Itron, Gary Murphy of BC Hydro and Dave Geier of SDG&E to discuss the current state of the smart grid transition and to get their perspectives on the new set of offerings in Cisco’s Connected Grid portfoli0. Through a host of new solutions, services and partnerships for utilities, Cisco aims to provide a common communications and network platform to help utilities move forward with grid modernization efforts.                                                                                     

We began with Itron, which joined with Cisco in 2011 in an effort to combine expertise and offer a fully-compliant IPv6 Field Area Network (FAN) solution to the industry. 

Cisco:  The alliance between Cisco and Itron has produced its first solution for the utility industry. Can you talk a little about why you felt this union made sense?

Itron: Both Cisco and Itron have their own unique expertise. When it comes to Cisco, information technology is core to what they do and it elevates the value of what we offer to customers. Combined with Itron’s proven expertise in delivering operational technologies that utilities use to run their businesses, this partnership established a vision to create a smart grid platform that will help move both companies forward.  

 Next we turned to BC Hydro and SDG&E, two utility companies who are both utilizing Cisco’s new FAN solution. 

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Tags: Cisco Connected Grid, Connected Energy, Smart Grid

Cisco’s Connected Energy Group is exhibiting at the DistribuTECH conference taking place this week in San Diego, where it is making some exciting updates as well. Building on progress made in 2010 and expanding its smart grid activities in substation and home, Cisco is announcing partnerships with leading smart grid industry players ECOtality and Cooper Industries.

Cisco and ECOtality have completed the development for integrating the Blink Network charger interface with Cisco’s Home Energy Management Solution (HEMS).  http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2011/prod_013111c.html

Additionally, Cisco announced a strategic relationship with Cooper Industries where Cooper will incorporate Cisco’s Connected Grid products into their substation automation solutions.  http://www.cooperpower.com/news/pr.cfm?NewsID=247

Cisco’s vision is for information technology to transform how the world manages its energy and environmental challenges.  The goal of Cisco’s Connected Energy Group is to build an extensive product and services portfolio, based on a smarter, connected energy grid, that will bring this vision to reality.  Within the last year Cisco has made important steps to further its commitment to the energy/smart grid market with several strategic announcements, product introductions, key partnerships and acquisitions. Cisco continues that momentum this week through its partnerships with ECOtality and Cooper Industries.

For more information:

 - Cisco Connected Energy:

http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/energy/external_utilities.html

- ECOtality: http://www.ecotality.com

- Cooper Industries: http://www.cooperindustries.com

Tags: Connected Energy, Energy, Smart Grid