Kathleen Wolf Davis | Jun 03, 2014
Silicon Valley Power is the municipal utility for the
City of Santa Clara, California. The utility covers around 60,000
customers in the area. Recently, the municipality announced a project to
expand free outdoor wi-fi across the city.
In this installment
of our Utility2Utility series, we spoke with Silicon Valley Power’s
Larry Owens, manager of customer services, about that massive wi-fi
project.
Intelligent Utility: As a power utility, why add free outdoor wi-fi to a meter project, as you did with Santa Clara?
Owens:
During SVP’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) investigation
phase, we began to see two concepts come together regarding the backhaul
of meter data. The first concept arose out of the uncertainty on just
how far this first AMI deployment would take us into the future and what
functional elements that future might demand. With both wireless
connectivity and the Internet of things exploding, we knew that although
a narrow band solution would work for bringing back meter reads, it was
not going to be future proof.
The second concept was more
serendipity than planning. An existing municipal wi-fi company, called
MetroFi, provided free outdoor wi-fi to residents in Santa Clara under a
business model similar to commercial radio and TV, where the
advertisers provided revenue for a service that was otherwise free for
consumers. That business model failed in Santa Clara and across the
nation. The city’s residents who used that service pleaded with our
leaders to “do something” to save it. That got us thinking about how we
might utilize such a system for AMI. SVP purchased the hardware already
installed over half the city for pennies on the dollar, resurrected the
free Internet connection for the community and began to test the system
as an AMI backhaul on a separate secure channel (or SSID) of the
system.
Still, we were hesitant to think of wi-fi as future
proof with WiMax and LTE technologies coming down the pike. In 2010,
the American Appliance Manufacturers Association selected wi-fi as the
communication standard for smart appliances. It was then we knew Wi-fi
was going to be around for a quite a while. From that day on, a
city-wide Wi-fi system for AMI backhaul with one open “channel” (or
SSID) for free city-wide public Wi-fi was part of our plan. That plan
also included mobile workforce support, distribution system monitor and
control and supporting the Internet of Utility Things.
A key
ingredient for the system’s success was our close coordination and
partnership with our vendors, led by Elster Group, with Tropos (which
became ABB/Tropos) providing the wi-fi equipment for the Wide-Area
Network and Linkpath Communications providing outdoor system design and
ongoing public access and utility application field support.
Additionally, Milton Security Group has supported SVP in many areas of
network security and provides those essential services for the wi-fi
system as well.
And finally, we also asked our customers to
prioritize a list of benefits associated with advanced metering in Santa
Clara. The results (shown in the graph) are self-explanatory.
Customers sought the benefit of free outdoor wi-fi over all other
perceived benefits.
Intelligent Utility: What hurdles did you overcome during the larger SVP MeterConnect project? How did you overcome those?
Owens:
Thankfully, SVP was not among the first utilities to pursue advanced
metering and managed to avoid some of the more difficult challenges with
customer perception and technology shortcomings. Even so, the
technology is changing rapidly with new versions of AMI and Meter Data
Management software releases almost yearly. Between product selection
and implementation, we have seen at least two major upgrade releases by
our vendors. In one case, we even reworked our project plan and
upgraded during the development phase.
Probably the biggest
challenge is integrating the AMI system with the billing system. This
new world is complex and requires a great deal of attention to detail.
Adding to the complexity is the fact that for some period of time
utilities must operate a manual-reading system right alongside an
automated, AMI system. In our case, we bill both Water and Electricity;
services, which are on two different budgets and timelines for meter
deployment. That is a lot for one billing system to command and
control, and get right with every change, every transaction, every day.
Finally,
we were acutely aware of the public relations challenges associated
with introducing AMI to our customers. We were confident in our
customers’ ability to comprehend the benefits if we took a methodical
approach to not only testing and deploying meters in the community, but
also to providing education and anticipating customer concerns. A
proactive communications strategy involving both customer communications
channels and local media outreach resulted in positive coverage of SVP
MeterConnect and contributed, we believe, to continued high satisfaction
ratings in surveys of our business and residential customers.
Intelligent Utility: What benefits do you expect for you and for your customers--with both the meter upgrade program and the wi-fi?
Owens:
Although most utilities see a multitude of benefits coming from the
residential sector, SVP is different. At SVP over 90% of our
electricity sales go to businesses and, due to many factors including a
mild climate, we have a very minimal system peak. With some very large
electric accounts, one energy efficiency measure executed by a large
customer could, and often does, produce more savings than all
residential efficiency measures in a program year.
For our business
customers, the cost of electricity hits their bottom line directly.
While residential markets have their efficiency and advanced meter
champions, our business sector is continually pushing us to deliver more
energy information and products to help their business run more
efficiently and profitably. Launching a meter data portal with
threshold-based notifications for our business customers will be highly
regarded – as we are regularly reminded as we get ready to go-live with
system integrations and deploy meters to our businesses later this year.
The
wi-fi system, on the other hand, has over 6,000 daily users---a
combination of residents, employees and visitors. The system covers the
entire city which goes a long way to closing the digital divide in
Santa Clara. Without Internet connectivity, our low-income customers
would not be able to view their web-based meter data portal. This is a
group where saving even a little through a better understanding of their
daily energy use goes a long way. The combination of AMI and free
wi-fi makes this possible for everyone in Santa Clara.
In another
situation, a resident involved in a widespread outage came out to show
our field crews the SVP outage status webpage. He had connected to the
Internet and navigated to our web page via the SVP MeterConnect wi-fi
system, which failed over to the 4-6 hour battery backup. This is a
live demonstration of one of our use cases---maintaining Internet
connectivity during a disaster. Fortunately this was only an outage,
but as a demonstration it worked as designed.
Intelligent Utility: What unique considerations for the area did you encounter?
Owens:
Perhaps the most difficult part of this wonderful idea lies in the fact
that outdoor Wi-fi coverage will never be perfect for low-power devices
like smart phones and tablets. We’ve learned that increasing the
concentration of access points to increase the signal strength doesn’t
always work. Too many access points in an area can create
self-interference, which in turn works against providing a better user
experience. As you can imagine, there is a great deal of RF “noise” in
Silicon Valley already. Until the Wi-fi capabilities of low-power
devices improve, there will be frustration by users who are not in
reasonable proximity to an access point.
Intelligent Utility: Tell us about the requirements, considerations and differences when working with a city on a public project. What did that process entail?
Owens: In our case, the electric utility is a
municipally-owned enterprise of the City of Santa Clara; essentially a
department of the City itself. Silicon Valley Power owns and maintains
99% of the streetlights in the City. As a result, SVP had a fairly
straight path from idea to implementation. It was relatively easy to
turn up the wi-fi system in a quicker timeframe than the more complex
integration of the applications associated with advanced metering.
Additionally, wi-fi reception is not guaranteed and only offered as a
bonus to our advanced metering backhaul approach. We opened the system
to users even before it was complete and optimized, which was a full
year before we begin deploying meters. With advanced metering and
billing, all systems have to work right every day.
Intelligent Utility: How was the community involved in the project?
Owens:
SVP regularly performs research to get an understanding of our
customer’s perceptions and attitudes. SVP undertook two pilot
deployments; one to test the technology in the field and one to hone our
businesses processes. These were supported by neighborhood meetings
ahead of these deployments. In addition, as mentioned above, a
comprehensive communications plan was implemented to anticipate and
address any customer concerns.
Intelligent Utility: What advice would you give other utilities tackling a meter upgrade program? Would you tell them to add on free wi-fi?
Owens: If I
had the decision to make over again, I would definitely include the
option of using a Wi-fi network as a dynamic opportunity to expand
communication capabilities beyond the support of simple meter reads.
Although not perfect for every situation, wi-fi is a ubiquitous
standard, it is one of the most actively examined and secured standards,
most equipment suppliers have a Wi-fi communication option and the
bandwidth capability is future proof. Because of its flexibility and
security, we will use it for distribution monitoring and to support
workers in the field via a secure channel.
A funny story: I was
presenting the system to a local chapter of IEEE whose focus is wireless
technology. The question of security came up and started a rousing
conversation. One side of the conversation was about how wi-fi is one
of the most “attacked” wireless protocols. Yet wi-fi is also the most
studied and secured standard at the same time. I asked them, “Would you
trust a non-standard proprietary system by company X that was not
constantly “tested” or the wi-fi standard that is tested by thousands
and improved constantly?” Their trust was with wi-fi. To which I said,
“And I have faith that you Silicon Valley wireless engineers will keep
it that way!”
Free outdoor public wi-fi to all areas of the city
is impossible to get perfect and has turned out to be a moving target.
After our first heat mapping of the Wi-fi signal strength confirmed
that there is great coverage for laptop users, but power sipping smart
phones will be frustrated unless they are within site of an access
point. We’re spending some time managing expectations while at the same
time working on a plan to infill our weakest areas. Some city-wide
wi-fi implementations like Google’s outdoor wi-fi in Mountain View, CA
are removing access points from everywhere except places where people
are known to congregate, such as their downtown area. In our case, we
wanted connectivity to every corner of the city to support IP-based
connectivity to any device we install in our territory. There are some
utilities taking a hybrid approach: ubiquitous wi-fi access to support
IP-based connectivity to devices throughout their territory, but the
opening of a channel (SSID) for public wi-fi is limited or not offered
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