Enterprise integration implications for home-area network technologies

The interaction of customer network equipment and utility operations is an area of growing interest in the industry. There is significant potential for customers to be able to make energy choices that better suit their needs, both financially and to support societal goals important to them, such as those related to encouraging renewable generation or reducing carbon emissions. Similarly, utilities have potentially significant opportunities to reduce demand, lower emissions, manage local demand restrictions on equipment, and improve facility utilization. Significant effort is being put into defining the requirements (i) for the residential customer's home area network (HAN) and (ii) for market-based quantities, like price and schedule. However, work is just beginning to define how the information flows from the customer and markets will affect information systems in the utility operations enterprise. This paper discusses a potential structure for handling enterprise integration in utility operations and discusses steps that the MultiSpeak <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> Initiative is taking to develop standardized data objects and services to support these needs.