PCN Technology

(Reference: San Diego Union Tribune, Onell Soto)

A San Diego company says it has found a novel way to communicate through electricity lines, allowing it to transmit video to billboards, payment information to gas pumps and data about the operation of an electric grid to power companies without radio waves or additional wires.

If adopted broadly — the company notes that it’s just beginning to commercialize what it has developed — the technology could invisibly change the way factories are run, gas stations are built and power is distributed.

Technology to transmit data over electric lines has been around for decades, but with limitations. The oldest technology carries very little data for very short distances, so it’s useful primarily for turning lights on and off remotely.

Another technology, broadband over power line, was seen as a way to use the electric grid to connect to the Internet for customers who otherwise wouldn’t get it, but it was costly.

What PCN Technology developed is something in the middle, a way of getting a moderate amount of data across medium distances.

It won’t replace data networks many are now familiar with — cable television or broadband wireless connections — but it will work with them so that devices can better communicate with one another.

And because of the way it works, it can help collect and transmit the data needed to more efficiently make and distribute electricity through “smart grids.”

David Strumpf, PCN’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said the technology arose from his work in industrial communications — that is, how to get robots and other machinery in a factory to talk to each other and the computers that control them.

Using radio waves, which any wireless solution would require, was difficult because of interference from the motors in the machines. Standard communication cables were costly and unreliable.

Strumpf hit on using something all the machines had in common: the power cables they used for electricity. Now PCN, which has sold about 20,000 of its chips to manufacturers of other products, is looking at a variety of uses for its technology.

With a gas-pump maker, it’s testing the use of power lines to hook up data for video and credit card transactions at gas stations without tearing up the pavement. And because the data are in the power lines, they’re secure. They can’t be stolen out of the air by outsiders.

Billboards could be modified to display video messages, without having to run new cables. Railroads could use the technology to communicate up and down a train by sending the signals through the coaches and couplings.

But it’s the smart-grid applications that have attracted interest from green-minded investors.

In 2008, Rancho Bernardo-based PCN raised $6 million from Enertech Capital, a clean-energy venture fund, said Chief Executive Venkat Shastri. He is negotiating for additional rounds of funding.

The smart-grid benefits were a surprising side effect of the way PCN’s chips talk to one another, Shastri said.

The chips scan the activity on an electrical cable to figure out, hundreds of times a second, a quiet frequency on which to transmit data. When that frequency gets noisy, they find another one that works.

Shastri compared it to a cabbie in busy traffic, figuring out which lane will move him forward, then changing lanes when another opens up.

“We always find sweet spots,” he said. “We make decisions in real time about which frequencies to use, how to use them, how loud to talk, so we can get the data across in a very reliable way.”

The concept is familiar to those who know wireless communication, where the Qualcomm-developed technology CDMA, or code division multiple access, is used to transmit multiple conversations over the same bandwidth.

With power-line communication as PCN does it, however, there’s an added benefit. To figure out where to send the signals, the company’s chips have to work out what’s going on with the electricity in the wires.

“Basically, it’s an entire grid-analytics system,” said Daniel Drolet, one of the company’s founders.

And those data — about how much power is being used, its voltage and other qualities — are valuable to the people who run electric grids, said Katherine Hamilton, who heads the Gridwise Alliance, a utility industry group.

“This kind of information is critical,” she said. “This is what the smart grid is, knowing what’s going on in your equipment, what’s going on in your lines.”

Hamilton said she was unfamiliar with PCN, but that communications and monitoring are essential and that many companies are working on a variety of solutions.

“If you view the electric grid holistically and you take into account all these pieces of technology in the grid, the main component is the ability to communicate,” she said.

The term “smart grid” means different things to different people, but at its heart, the idea is to use computer technology to make the generation, transmission and use of electricity more efficient.

PCN says it is getting an early test of what its technology can do in Europe. It has set up a pilot program outside Warsaw, Poland, with a utility that serves about 5 million customers in the eastern half of the country.

PCN will provide smart meters and communications through power lines to about 120 customers in the next month. Other companies will provide the equipment and software to analyze the information.

“We are the only ones offering the power-line solution,” Shastri said.

Smart meters — devices with the ability to communicate to company headquarters and to users — are rolling out across the world as utilities are looking for ways to better track and predict power usage.

Many communicate using cell phone networks; others use radio waves or the power lines themselves.

The company’s technology will help utilities figure out when someone is stealing from them by illegally tapping into power lines, information they get today only with visual inspections.

PCN says its technology gives it an edge over other power-line communications systems — commonly known as BPL, or broadband over power line — in that it can push its data across transformers.

“If they have made an advance there, that’s meaningful,” said Rajesh Gupta, a professor in the computer science and engineering department at the University of California San Diego.

Gupta said transformers scramble data sent by other means. This roadblock could only be overcome with an expensive bypass, a communications cable connected to modules on each side of the transformer.

And that’s just one of the problems with trying to transmit data along the same wires where electricity flows, said Gupta, a smart-grid expert.

“Power line is an inherently noisy medium,” he said.

Shastri said noise — often defined as unwanted signals — helps PCN’s chips communicate and at the same time figure out what’s going on in an electrical circuit.