Telecommunications assessment for a Consumer Portal

A Consumer Portal provides a communications gateway between energy providers and consumers for energy service functions. The functions enabled by the consumer portal helps the utilities reduce costs through more efficient operation, secure revenue from additional services and defer costs to accommodate load growth. Examples of Portal applications include AMR, demand response, real time pricing, theft detection, remote disconnect, energy management, DER interface and control, and outage detection. The wake of failed portal pilot projects left by this industry demonstrates the need for a standardized, open architecture and gateway to allow technology providers to develop equipment and applications that meet the evolving needs of utilities. This paper presents the main results of the EPRI IntelliGrid report on Technologies for a Consumer Portal. The report consists of a summary of the different communications technologies that may be associated with the implementation of consumer portal functionality and an assessment of the applicability of each technology. This work defines a list of criteria, based on the initial recommendations of the IntelliGrid Architecture, for evaluating consumer portal communications technologies. Then the criteria are applied to a subset of the technologies identified in the IntelliGrid Architecture to create a table of technology ratings. These technology ratings provide a starting point for the evaluation of technologies for a particular application but may be adjusted for individual projects based on the specific conditions. Key issues for each category of technologies are analyzed