Electricity AMI OpenWay® by Itron Earns ZigBee® Smart Energy Certification Read how Smart Energy Certification is a testament to OpenWay and its capacity for interoperable communication. click here for more information The Smart Grid: A System of Systems As noted earlier, the North American power transmission and distribution system—"The Grid"—is considered the largest machine in the history of mankind. As you might expect, that machine has many, many different parts. Likewise, the coming Smart Grid will also be a system of systems. click here for more information

OpenWay® by Itron Earns ZigBee® Smart Energy Certification
		The Itron OpenWay CENTRON® electricity meter and OpenWay Gas Module are among the first ZigBee Smart Energy certified products. These two products provide the metering portion of OpenWay, Itron's advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solution. ZigBee Smart Energy is an open-source application for energy management that communicates across ZigBee wireless networks. The application enables wireless communication
between utility companies and common household devices such as smart thermostats and appliances. It improves energy efficiency by allowing consumers to manage their energy consumption more precisely using automation and near real-time information. Every OpenWay CENTRON comes equipped with ZigBee wireless networking technology. With this technology, utilities can send price or system signals into a residence. Once there, other ZigBee devices can respond to those signals according to preferences set by the residents. Utilities can also use ZigBee to gather data from natural gas meters and send it to OpenWay CENTRON meters, thus using one communications network to read two types of meters. Itron played a major role in the development of ZigBee Smart Energy for the ZigBee Alliance. Ed May, director of AMI business development for Itron, sits on the ZigBee Alliance board of directors. John Buffington, senior principal design engineer, served as the technical editor for the Smart Energy specification. Matt Spaur, AMI business development, chairs the ZigBee Smart Energy marketing group. Several other Itron employees also donated significant efforts toward the completion of the Smart Energy specification and certification of products according to that specification. The ZigBee Alliance is a non-profit association of more than 260 member companies driving development of ZigBee wireless technology. The Alliance promotes world-wide adoption of ZigBee as the leading wirelessly networked, sensing and control standard for use in energy, home, commercial and industrial areas. For more details on ZigBee Smart Energy and a list of certified products, please visit www.ZigBee.org/SmartEnergy.

The Smart Grid: A System of Systems
		As noted earlier, the North American power transmission and distribution system—"The Grid"—is considered the largest machine in the history of mankind. As you might expect, that machine has many, many different parts. Likewise, the coming Smart Grid will also be a system of systems. AMI solutions like OpenWay® by Itron are a key system of the Smart Grid. Advanced metering is the fingertips used in
grid-sensing, manipulating and responding to signals. Many Smart Grid systems will be communication and control networks, including: Home area networks—devices inside homes that communicate and interoperate to manage energy. Local area networks—these networks connect homes and businesses at the neighborhood level to carry network communications. Wide area networks—these networks connect neighborhoods to the utility central offices. Supervisory control and data acquisition networks—these networks send general collection information and perform operations in near-real time. SCADA networks are commonly used to monitor and control high-voltage transmission networks. Distribution automation—communication and control networks that report on and operate the switches and routers in the distribution network. The Smart Grid is also expected to work with various types of new power sources. Those sources include distributed generation, such as residential solar panels; renewable energy sources, such as wind power farms; and energy storage devices, such as flywheels, large scale batteries, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The Smart Grid, like the current grid, will take decades to build. This fact has several implications for the various technologies involved. One, each technology installation will have to meet its own cost justification. The Smart Grid is simply too big to pay for all at once at the end of the project. Two, each technology must supply enough defined points of interoperability to fit into the current and the projected infrastructure. The vision of the Smart Grid is that, over time, these various systems will become increasingly smart, interoperable and responsive, allowing us to make the most of the energy that we generate and transmit.