Parks Associates hosting Residential Energy Management Webcast

Parks Associates is hosting a Residential Energy Management on Thursday, February 25th at 1 PM Central.

With the president’s stimulus bill squarely behind Smart Grid development, 2010 should see significant investment in new technologies from the back office to the network to the meter and to devices in the home. Will consumers pay to purchase devices with energy savings potential?

For more information, visit
http://www.parksassociates.com/events/webcasts.htm

4 Steps to Residential Energy Management

From most news sources this week we hear progress, or lack thereof, of our government’s work on a comprehensive health plan. The most credible voices of opposition hammer on the notion that loss of choice and control will reduce the ability for consumers to reduce the costs of their care. Apply that same thinking to energy consumption. Today I have the choice, on a balmy Texas-in-July afternoon, to reduce my energy consumption by changing the thermostat. But aside from choosing to be uncomfortable, do I know how to improve my energy efficiency? As green technology proponents frequently remind us, if we don’t know what our home systems cost to run, we certainly are not equipped to fine tune them to more efficiently fit our lifestyles.

The four elements required to put the consumer in charge of his or her energy costs are:
1. Sufficient motivation for the consumer to make changes in current consumption behavior (this is implied).
2. An understanding of the energy used by each home system, measured in kilowatt hours and dollars.
3. The ability to program and control at least the major home systems, using common and easy to understand intelligent user interfaces.
4. A feedback loop which confirms which systems are responding to which programs and to what extent they are impacting consumption of kilowatts and dollars.

It is interesting to watch the development of these four elements. Parks Associates will, in the next thirty days, complete a survey of consumers which will quantify how strongly consumers desire the ability to impact their energy costs. Are they willing to purchase devices and technologies that will enable elements of control and monitoring? Are they (we) willing to replace costly home systems with ones that can be controlled and programmed? Are we willing to pay service companies, perhaps including our electric utility, our broadband and phone providers, or local tradesmen to install devices with a potential payback of a year or more? These answers are critical to the growth potential of a number of emerging industries.

The market is awash with the promise of new devices from companies as diverse as Black & Decker, Google, GE and Control4 – all with the technology to monitor or control some number of home systems. Network infrastructures inside the home are rapidly maturing. Unlikely partners ZigBee and HomePlug have joined forces to develop the Smart Energy market requirements – a roadmap of sorts to suggest how wireless and wired technologies may be used to develop an in-home control network. The table is being set and the silverware polished for arrival of the Big Guests – that is, energy utilities with their Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) or Smart Grids. Analysts Bill Ablondi and Farhan Abid report that nearly 9 million AMI meters are currently installed on U.S. homes, and that Obama’s Stimulus Bill fuels the rapid deployment of Smart Grids with $11 billion in federal funding.

The Big Guests are coming to the table and will be showcasing solutions, as currently in Colorado Springs and Austin, Texas, which provide consumers with frequent feedback on energy consumption. Here is how the party will unfold; as the Smart Grid is in place, we will see first a growing number of technologies that provide in home monitoring of our home’s usage. This will be followed by introduction of smart appliances – refrigerators and water heaters which, like existing programmable thermostats for HVAC systems, can be programmed. This development will create demand for simple unified interfaces – applications that bring the control of several appliances together under an orchestrated master plan. Finally, we will see our Internet, mobile phone and even TV service providers cautiously join the party – seeking to provide control applications as extensions of the mobile phone service, or as a widget on TV, with the assumption that simpler controls will garner a few extra dollars on the monthly bill.

Unlike the current health care policy quagmire, our stimulus dollars at work combined with private enterprise will empower consumers with a growing variety of technologies to tailor energy costs to meet particular lifestyle needs.

Over Eight Million Smart Meters Deployed in U.S., with Millions More to Come

Report profiles key players in Residential Energy Management, analyzes new opportunities for companies in the Smart Grid value chain--

With over eight million smart meters already deployed in the U.S., the market for residential energy management (REM) has taken the first significant steps in deploying Smart Grid technologies and advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) on a broad scale.

The recently completed report, Residential Energy Management: Company, Alliance & Technology Profiles, says these deployments will open up significant opportunities for companies in the REM value chain. Public, private, and consumer factors are all driving this growth, and the Federal stimulus bill, with the support of the Obama Administration, allocates $11 billion for smart grid initiatives through 2010.

Residential Energy Management: Company, Alliance & Technology Profiles provides coverage of more than 60 companies and ten alliances, including Home Area Network (HAN) solutions and component suppliers; metering solutions manufacturers; Smart Grid enablers; and technology enablers.

This report is the first deliverable in Parks Associates’ comprehensive industry and consumer research service called Residential Energy Management: Opportunities for Digital Systems and Services.

For the full press release, visit click here.

Parks Associates forecasts over 640 million broadband households worldwide by 2013

Value-added services, stimulus funds will help increase subscriber numbers --

The demand for high-bandwidth applications will jump in the next few years as the number of households worldwide with broadband will reach close to 650 million by 2013, according to international research firm Parks Associates. The firm’s new report Broadband Services: Global Outlook warns that service providers will have to continue investing in network technologies to accommodate multiple services such as video-on-demand and converging social-networking applications.

Parks Associates reports the number of broadband households worldwide grew by over 18% in 2008 to exceed 400 million. Asia-Pacific is the largest market, accounting for over 160 million subscribers, and it will have over 49% of the global market share by 2013.

In the U.S., the federal government, at the request of the Obama Administration, will soon release billions of dollars from the stimulus package to promote expansion of affordable high-speed Internet services in rural areas, which will open new areas in this country to advanced online services.

Bandwidth will continue to be a focus as the operators re-architect their networks to deliver multiple services over the same infrastructure; however, in such a competitive field, bandwidth alone is not enough to win subscribers. Blended applications, combining services such as online video and customer support, offer operators an opportunity to increase ARPU. In addition, innovative new services will help differentiate service providers, which can then compete on factors beyond pricing or raw bandwidth.

For the full press release, click here.

Who's Going to Administer the Broadband Stimulus and How Long Would it Take?

Now that the U.S. Senate may be making substantial changes to the economic stimulus bill that passed the U.S. House last week, the Congressional Budget Office has offered its take on what some of the new provisions might mean. The CBO's explanation goes a long way to answering some questions I've had about who would oversee the broadband deployments that are intended under the $9 billion grant program to extend access to unserved and underserved areas.

The grant funds would be given to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to administer. CBO estimates that we wouldn't see an immediate stimulus from these funds, however. They note that grant recipients would still be required to raise 20% of the rollout/upgrade costs from non-federal sources. And, CBO notes that only 30% of the allotted grants would be spent between fiscal 2009 and 2011.

Still, I wonder if this isn't a bad thing. I'm still wondering how the planning for this is going to take place. We keep hearing that the road and bridge infrastructure portions of the stimulus package could be implemented immediately (according to the Obama administration). We're told that there are road and bridge construction contracts just waiting for funding, and that people could hit the streets in very rapid fashion to start the work. On the broaband side, I wonder if this is the case? Are the state and local governments in a position to rapidly determine the best bang for the buck? Are there some other areas- like telehealth and distance learning - that would benefit from the broadband deployments? If so, how is the coordination between health and education officials, the government authorities, and the operators who will be laying the broadband infrastructure? I'd sure like to get a sense of the coordination (or lack thereof) that's occuring here?

Broadband Stimulus - So Many Questions

Verizon the Big Winner?
Here's a follow-up to the note about the potential impact of the stimulus package that may include incentives for getting broadband to unserved or underserved areas. There is some interesting speculation that Verizon could be the big winner in receiving tax incentives, regardless of whether they actually deploy deep fiber into the greenfield or underserved areas. Some view the proposed package as a way to light a fire under the cable MSOs and get them to expedite the deployments of DOCSIS 3.0.

Verizon comments on what the proposed legislation may mean on their own blog.

Who's Going to Manage This, Anyway?
After reading Verizon's policy blog, I posted a question that basically asks who's going to manage the process of getting the operators to work with the state and local authorities to actually deploy these broadband services? I'm wondering if operators will be given sole discretion to determine their rollout plans, or will government or quasi-government organizations be involved in the planning? How will the government measure the progress to assure that tax breaks are actually going to the companies that put installers into the field and get the services to the customers.

The Verizon folks were nice enough to respond with some thoughts. There could be a number of government entities involved in the process, from the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) at USDA and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce. Verizon also mentioned Connected Nation, which facilitates public-private partnerships to increase access to and use of broadband and related technology.

Are the U.S. and U.K. Strategies on Broadband Going to Do the Job?

Interesting that complaints were raised both in the U.S. and the U.K. this week regarding the broadband deployment strategies (or lack thereof) of the respective federal governments.

Although the current economic stimulus packages in Congress include $6-$9 billion in broadband-related funding, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a number of mid-sized operators are indicating that this won't cover the costs of deploying infrastructure to underserved areas, which is supposed to be a focus of the funding. The funding currently covers both new buildout and upgrades to existing networks.

In the U.K., the government released Digital Britain, which promises broadband to every U.K. household by 2012. However, critics are harsh in their reviews, saying the report offers no real concrete plans for how to accomplish this. I love how BBC News put it:

But the Conservatives said the report promised "no new action". The Lib Dems said it was a "complete damp squib".