Muses of Murari » Technology

Telcos & Smart Energy

saithilak — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:33:49 +0000

In continuation of last post on Smart Energy, I’ll add up couple of more points here.

Recently I read about the deal, between Vodafone Germany and Alcatel-Lucent over implementing utility metering solutions of the latter. In simple words, the electric meter at your home will no longer be a dumb device recording your energy expenditure. With Alcatel-Lucent’s solution, it can communicate to utilities back offices’ computers in real time via service providers’ network – DSL or wireless GPRS or LTE. That means you can see in real time, how much your home appliance eating up energy and thus helps you to reduce the energy consumption or schedule you consumption on low load period of day. So, with little planning, you can postpone or plan your washing machines chores at nights, where utilities can charge you for lesser amount. You may also be able to checkout your energy consumption pattern real time on utilities’ portal.

A win win situation for all. For you and me, it is reduction of energy bills as well doing our bit to conserve energy. For utilities, more modernization, reduced stress on their networks and more incentives from government for effective energy usage. Wait a minute, there is some other section that is getting excited - Telecom players. They are actively engaging with utilities to get some pie in this perceptibly bigger smart energy market. In my previous post I mentioned about AT&T deal with a power meter company. Now, Alcatel-Lucent partners up with Verizon Germany for smart meter services. It looks like, the Telcos are started gearing up to venture into non-traditional route to offer their services. The developments in this area is going to big in coming days and the ride it offers will be interesting too.

Smart Energy

saithilak — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:50:11 +0000

Smart Grid - AT&T ties up with a smart grid player, Silver Spring to use former’s network to transfer information from latter’s equipments. In short, lets say smart meter installed at certain locations and it transfers data, for example, load factor to utility’s center through IP services over telco’s wireless network. That is one simple example.

The kind of research and products done by companies like Silver Spring is interesting. The companies working on smart energy trying to reinvent the age old electricity generation, transmission and distribution with latest technologies and reduce the energy wastes. One particular scenario is being envisioned is distributed generation. New smart meters learns patterns of electricity usage from industries to public places to homes across day & night and shares data to the common grid which controls the loads on different generation units including clean energy units like wind power stations. For the home customers, utility companies can send reports about former energy usage real time or non-real time. By this way, individuals gets a chance to do his part in reducing energy consumption and of course, his utility bill.

More interesting story is in lines of Google Power meter. A theory how utilities can enter broadband business with Google Power meter. I already shared this in one of my earlier posts. Read it here.

Let me bring the scope in Indian context with my little knowledge. In recent times, especially after stock market started to surge, one can observe so many power/energy related IPOs has entered the Indian stock market. Government programmes like this one will surely drive more energy companies to participate in. The carbon credits market is driving many companies to go green. Few acquired renewable energy generators like Wind power, few brought in techniques to use the waste (heat) energy from industrial output to generate power and supply to local grids. When I was studying few years back, I studied that transmission loss alone was 40% of the total energy produced! That is whopping amount. Our country is in desperate mode to do something before we get hit badly down the years. And government is doing it by encouraging private companies to pitch in generation, distribution areas. The point I want to make here is, since we are in amidst of power reform to meet our future demands, it will be more prudent to pave way to the latest technologies like, smart grids, in our reform actions now. And clearly we need leadership in political capacities to do this or we need strong power lobby (from energy companies) to drive it.

That’s my two cents.

Opera 9.5 is cool

saithilak — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:16:30 +0000

I ditched Internet Explorer browser for Firefox when the latter was first released. Firefox attracted me for its tabbed browsing feature and also for lots of useful add-ons. Recently released Firefox 3 became cooler, for its features like smart address bar, multi line text selection and for ten other reasons. But, one browser which at present seducing me from FF3 is Opera 9.5

Opera is fast, sleek and super cool. It can be used as an e-mail client. Either you can do a Pop3 or IMAP from you mail server directly to opera browser. And of course, smtp is also supported. I tried IMAP with two of my gmail accounts. The configuration was duh-duh. I was not even prompted me for the port numbers. Opera engine picked up them nicely. I didn’t check for other mail services though.

Remember, Mozilla started with its internet suite which had web browser, e-mail client and IRC chat feature. It was bulky and memory guzzler. But, present day Opera supports similar browser and e-mail client (except IRC, which became near-extinct) and more features, and yet it is one of the fastest and less memory hogging browsers available today.

For a long time, I wanted a notepad like feature in browser itself. This feature is not present in Firefox, though there are add-ons available. In Opera this feature comes in-built and comes very handy. And also the BitTorrent support in browser is blessing in-disguise for bandwidth hungry movie-mp3 downloaders. The easy interface, mail contacts display, links display, in-built RSS feed reader, speed dial and smart address bar are some of the highlights of the browser.

And another killer feature (in future) is synchronizing PC Opera bookmarks with other Opera versions like Opera mini (on Mobile phones). Opera mini is another cool browser that works in many of the today’s mobile phones. It is one of the best browsers available for non-smart phones today.

Nothing can be perfect. So as this browser. There are websites like Yahoo Maps India which doesn’t support Opera yet. Some times, this browser may leave you perplexed, when simple things like leaving comments on Blogger, failing! (Even while writing this post using WordPress, the blog software prompted for authentication many times!) That’s a BIG thumbs down. Hope these issues will be fixed in future releases. And also the add-ons for Opera are not that extensive like Firefox. So are its user base and followers! I hope Opera will receive its deserving market share slowly but steadily, as Opera team continues to innovate in future.

Telcos & Smart Energy