Automation.com, May 2012 By Bill Lydon, Editor As Ethernet has gained popularity in the industry and systems have evolved, the nature of Echelon's business has changed. The company has been building a business position centered on energy metering and smart grid.
May 2012
By Bill Lydon, Editor
I had a discussion at AHR 2012 with Echelon’s Varun Nagaraj - Sr. VP Product Management & Product Marketing, Steve Nguyen - Director Product Marketing Commercial Markets, and Amy Lee - Director, Communications to discuss the new Echelon (
www.echelon.com) initiatives.
Echelon Corporation (
NASDAQ:
ELON) started with high expectations in 1988 with the intent to provide the World’s single most used sensor actuator network for use in all control and automation applications including industrial, process control, home automation and building automaton centered around their LON chips and network operating system architecture. Echelon gained acceptance in the Building Automation System (BAS) industry being adopted by a number of major and minor BAS suppliers. Their primary competition has been BACnet protocols which are an ASHRAE standard. As Ethernet has gained popularity in the industry and systems have evolved, the nature of Echelon’s business has changed. The company has been building a business position centered on energy metering and smart grid. At the Needham Growth Conference held January 10-12, 2011, Echelon noted their outlook for business is approximately 33% commercial and 62% utility. The company reported that over 35 million homes, 300,000 buildings and 100 million devices are connected to the smart grid with Echelon technology.
Industry Evolution
Nguyen described Echelon’s view of the industry evolution in three stages.
Proprietary
The first phase was individual proprietary controls with “stove-piped functions” (silos), and multiple “front-ends”.
Smart Buildings
Partial integration across business silos, multiple open protocols, and communications to the Internet.
Grid-aware
Echelon believes the industry is entering a third phase characterized as grid-aware buildings that require multi-protocols, cross-silo framework for new applications, dynamic load modulation, and fine-grained load control. This was emphasized with a quote from Eric Bloom, Research Analyst of Pike Research, “A grid-aware building is a building that is technology enabled to respond to real-time events on the utility side of the meter in order to improve grid stability conditions or benefit from dynamic price signals.”
Nguyen framed the change this way, “Our new stance is bringing the smart building together, a big change for us is embracing interoperability at the control level…” (Editor’s note: In the past, Echelon was always been focused on making LON the single network standard at the control level.) “Now we recognize that is not the way the world is…”
Echelon makes the case that they are the best fit for the future because the transition to grid-aware buildings brings the smart grid and smart building together requiring a common energy control networking platform based on Echelon’s proven open standard. In their words, implementing a future-proof building will require new levels of openness and interoperability and Echelon is committed to providing the technology to realize this vision.
Announcements
Echelon made announcements supporting this direction at AHR 2012.
BACnet Gateway Strategy
This application runs on the Echelon SmartServer that has the Data Point Abstraction Layer to normalize BACnet information to the LON architecture. This interface translates selected SmartServer data points into BACnet objects and also bridges Modbus and M-bus devices. This complies with the BACnet Conformance Compliance Test Suite. This is the result of collaboration with ConnectEx, Inc. (
www.connect-ex.com) and is currently available to select beta customers.
Echelon BACnet Interface
Open Building Specification Guide
The Open Building Specification Guide is information building professionals can use to architect interoperable systems. The guide is a collection of standards and documents initially focuses on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Subsequent releases will expand the scope of this specification to include other critical building functions. The specification stipulates how to maintain an open procurement environment both for the initial install and for the life of the building. The Open Building Specification Guide can be down loaded at:
www.echelon.com/myspec
OpenLNS Network Operating System
The royalty-free Echelon
OpenLNS network operating system enables software developers to build applications that can commission, configure, monitor, control, diagnose and repair any LonWorks-based device in a building control network. These applications can implement a wide range of policies determined by the building professional to balance comfort and energy savings, including how to respond to a request from the grid for energy reduction or a signal from the grid with variable pricing. The OpenLNS beta will became available in February and will be generally available in second half of 2012. OpenLNS will not have any royalty or credit fees. Available for beta January 31, 2012, details:
www.echelon.com/OpenLNSbeta
Building Energy Management Toolkit
The Building Energy Management 1.1 toolkit is for multi-site organizations running on the Echelon SmartServer. It includes over a dozen wizards and templates that allow companies to integrate third party sub-meters and third-party software applications for energy monitoring, analytics, and real-time energy control. Interested developers looking to integrate their enterprise applications can register to download the toolkit beta at
www.echelon.com/BEMToolkit
Thoughts & Observations
Echelon has had a number of bumps in the road as a company and reinvented itself along the way. The company was fortunate to have started with significant venture capital that allowed for this flexibility.
During the interview at AHR 2012, I was told that Echelon derives about 30% of revenues from North American. This is not surprising with their focus on smart meters which is being adopted earlier in other countries. This may be an advantage for Echelon since they are gaining experience in the market that has had early adopters of smart metering.
They noted that more than 500 cities with smart street lighting use Echelon products and are controlled using power line communications. Early Power line communications technology from other vendors was very unreliable but with newer reliable technology it would seem to be a natural for street light control.
The royalty free OpenLNS may solve a major complaint by users and system integrators.
In our discussion about the smart grid, the Echelon people talked about the smart meter, substations, balancing the network with capacitor banks, controlling re-closers, and other items. I pointed out that the IEC 61850 communications standards focus on re-closers and other substation functions. Standards are great - everyone has their own!
