Some Technologies Get a Second Chance

As the world takes heed of the global warnings more and more industries are turning around searching for additional technologies that could boost energy savings and minimize power consumption while maintaining a decent level of efficiency. One such technology, almost forgotten, that has now a new field day is Zigbee, a networking standard that uses power lines to communicate with different machines.

Utilities and appliance makers are looking to reduce household power consumption and here Zigbee could really be useful, at least if more house intended appliances would be built with support for it. The main idea behind this move is to install smart power meter houses that could control some of the appliances between certain time frames. This would work for both house owners that would get smaller energy bills, while utility providers could better control the power consumption. All this could be achieved using Zigbee, a low-power, low-bandwidth wireless networking standard introduced in 2004 that never really gained much market acceptance. Now, it could be used to let different machines talk to each other by using existing power lines.

Michael Valocchi, a partner in the Energy and Utilities, Global Business Services unit at IBM, was cited by the news site News.com saying: "It is almost like fitting in a couple of missing pieces into the puzzle. This puts in some level of certainty with demand response."

A number of utilities companies already tested Zigbee implementations and the EnerNoc firm that sells smart metering services and technologies to utilities, considers that the whole idea has a lot of potential, but the development process must continue. While there are people that do not like the idea of remote companies controlling their home appliances, in Europe, the concept is already a success as an Italian company is offering deep energy bills discounts to home owners that are shutting down completely the energy while they are gone for the weekend.