Power meters gear up for Smart Grid service
By Margery Conner, Technical Editor, EDN -- Test & Measurement World, 5/1/2009 2:00:00 AM
Most residences and commercial buildings in the US use old-style electromechanical utility power meters to track electricity use. The meters are reliable and cheap but are inadequate for use by a power-distribution system that requires accurate, repeatable power metrics as well as wired or wireless communications—in other words, the coming Smart Grid electrical-power-distribution system.
The Smart Grid depends on smart meters with sophisticated communication capabilities to monitor energy usage and allow residential and business consumers alike to make informed choices about how much energy to use and when to consume it. The Smart Grid faces difficulties, though. Although Washington has passed legislation such as the 2007 energy bill and the 2009 stimulus plan that encourage widespread use of the Smart Grid, utilities actually deploy power on a state-by-state basis, so the technology won't be fully deployed until each state takes action. California and Texas are the states most aggressively moving toward smart metering in preparation for the Smart Grid.
 Smart power meters comprise a microcontroller with onboard analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion, a sense component for both voltage and current, an AC/DC-power converter, battery backup, and wireless or wired communication capability. |
Regardless of whether the Smart Grid in some form will proceed at the national level smoothly and seamlessly, enough individual utilities are purchasing and installing electronic power meters to make this market significant. Utility companies could replace 500 million meters worldwide over the next 10 years.
Current transformers, Rogowski coils, and resistive shunts make up the three main types of current-sensor technology for power meters. To make a smart meter, current sensors team up with power-meter ICs, which can perform some digital signal processing calculations on voltage waveforms, communicate the information to a display, and store the information to be sent over a wired or wireless communications interface. To learn how to select smart power meter components, read the full article in our sibling publication EDN at www.edn.com/article/CA6643364.html.
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