CEA Helps US Utility Companies and Green Button Set New Standard for Smart Energy
posted Sunday May 19, 2013 by Nicholas DiMeo
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the organization that bring you the International CES each and every year, has remained on the forefront of setting standards, practices and policies to each sector of the consumer electronics industry. From convincing politicians to enact laws to protect the space, or to educate consumers on the latest tech trends and things that affect the masses, the CEA is a very important organization for anyone who owns or operates a piece of technology. This week, the CEA has stepped in to announce that are working on a new standard for smart energy and connected homes. This would include all Internet-connected devices in your house and any energy-saving tech gadgets, along with the entire home automation space.
Named the R7.8 Working Group 2, the standard will help the gadgets in your home send energy usage data to and from energy managements apps and systems. In the announcement, the CEA said what the name of the standard will be and how it will all work moving forward.
The new standard will be called CE-Energy Usage Information (CE-EUI) and will conform to the North American Energy Standards Board Energy Usage Information (NAESB -EUI) model, which forms the basis for the national Green Button initiative.
If you're not familiar with Green Button, here's what it's all about,
Green Button is the common-sense idea that electricity customers should be able to securely download their own easy-to-understand energy usage information from their utility or electricity supplier. Armed with this information, consumers can use a growing array of new web and smartphone tools to make more informed energy decisions, optimize the size and cost-effectiveness of solar panels for their home, or verify that energy-efficiency retrofit investments are performing as promised. Consumers can even use fun innovative apps that allow individuals to compete against Facebook friends to save energy and lower their carbon emissions.
Brian Markwalter, Senior VP on research and standards at CEA, said,
Product manufacturers already understand how much energy a device will use during operation, based on its design. By programming that information into the device and enabling the device to calculate how much energy it uses over time, manufacturers can help homeowners accurately capture the data for their energy management systems and applications.
In the end, this is all happening to finally bring a level of compatibility to the Green Button "Download My Data" and "Connect My Data" programs. The best part is that the system and standard will allow devices to work over Wi-Fi, Ethernet, ZigBee and Z-Wave, which all exist in one device or another in a house, but at this time, cannot talk to each other. It seems that now that the CEA is behind this, utility companies will be quick to adopt the program, with a standard in place, and bring the companies into the new era of technology.
