PCN wins 2007 Frost & Sullivan AMR award March 1, 2009
PCN Wins 2007 Frost & Sullivan AMR Award with Industrial PLC Plug-n-play Smart Grid
(Reproduced from the November 6, 2007 issue of BPL Today with permission of the publisher, GHI LLC [www.bpltoday.com, +1-202-298-8201])
PCN Technology of Santa Clara, Calif spent years quietly perfecting an embedded subsystem device that lets new and legacy automation and monitoring systems used by industries and utilities communicate with each other over power lines.
The system is a universal translator of sorts that can effectively inject the ’smart’ into a very wide variety of systems using a very long list of existing communications protocols.
The device is used by OEMs to let their products — that may be designed for any of a long list of wired and wireless communications technologies and protocols — communicate very long distances of power lines within a factory or plant or down the MV lines of the utility.
PCN technology was first used — and still mainly used in industrial systems, but some time ago power meter makers and others in the grid infrastructure world took notice, Dan Drolet told us last week.
He’s vice president and co-founder of PCN. And he believes in power line communications. ‘Building out the ‘˜smart grid’ on the power line makes obvious and economical sense.’
The firm’s name isn’t better recognized because it sells to OEMs, but PCN has won many ‘top tier’ industrial customers and utilities, said Drolet.
That makes it hard to win big press reports since the big-name customers are buying gear from PCN’s customers, not PCN, reported Drolet, and the gear-maker has to keep quiet.
End users of PCN’s gear are firms that need to communicate using multiple types of protocols for multiple industrial devices such as in the car manufacturing industry, motor control centers, tenant sub-metering, power management and lighting for large buildings. Over a dozen industrial standard protocols can be brought to ZigBee hotspots, for example, or to backbones for wireless signals, converted to IP and sent over the power grid, Drolet explained. “Due to the sometimes prohibitive cost of wiring, the use of power lines instead of re-wiring industrial facilities makes economical sense. We are not competing against wireless. We know [end users] will use it. We want to partner with other technologies,’ said Drolet.
He and co-founder David Strumpf saw the need for alternatives to wireless communication for mission critical and industrial control environments.
To that end they brought onboard Albert Hugo-Martinez as chairman and Dr Venkat Shastri as CEO. Hugo-Martinez is a board member of Microchip Technology and has extensive module and semiconductor experience. Shastri in an expert in automation and worked on the Mars Pathfinder, noted Drolet.
‘You can’t get any more automated than that.’
Is it BPL?
When the IEEE creates a BPL standard, PCN’s gear will be compliant, said Drolet, but beyond that the system is largely proprietary, though it uses open standards and architectures. It’s not meant to be a broadband distribution tool.
It delivers up to 4 mbps now and can handle VOIP and IPTV — and the firm is committed to giving its customers what they demand. For now that’s mostly smart grid, smart industry and smart building technology. The devices are an inch or so square thus integrate easily into OEM products. The communication is broken into channels on the physical medium and passes through transformers in a novel way.
The proprietary chipset samples a wide range of frequencies — broken up into channels — every 2.5 milliseconds and picks the least noisy channel or channels to pass through the transformer and power lines.
The system delivers 250 kbps/channel and a typical device has 16 channels. If only one of those channels is open, that’s plenty of bandwidth for the applications being served, noted Drolet. When all are open, the bandwidth is 4 mbps.
‘Our goal is for a MAC addressable mesh network building block that can matrix all of the protocols and transmit over power lines,’ said Drolet.
‘We’re not trying to take all the applications such as VOIP and IPTV down the line, but handling the kilobytes to small megabytes is enough to meet the utility’s needs and future needs for growing the smart grid applications,’ he added.
‘First we worked with feet, then thousands of feet and now in 2008 our products reach out to the substation, three to five mile range and more,’ said Drolet.
‘Our patented technology is going through multiple phase electrical systems,’ Drolet explains.
What about security?
Using the power lines offers inherent security. For one thing, they carry deadly voltage, noted Drolet. But he’s also of aware of concerns about using IP for command and control of utility infrastructure. Security experts warn utilities are a possible target for attacks.
Thus PCN encrypts both sides of the communication to keep a connected home or business from being used for unwanted access to the utility’s equipment.
Frost is impressed.
PCN won the 2007 Frost & Sullivan North American Technology Innovation Award in Smart Metering and Smart Grids — and you likely read it here first. The firm was awarded the Most Outstanding Clean Energy Smart Grid Venture Award by the Texas Clean Energy Venture Conference in June inAustin, Texas. And in La Baule, France, the California Tech Showcase awarded PCN innovation honors given to about 40 California firms chosen from over 700. The showcase helps Europe track the latest innovations in California. The smart grid is coming, said Drolet. It’s here — and over the next few years it’s needed for security, managing utility costs and rate concerns. ‘I think BPL is only going to get brighter.”
What’s next?
In 2008, PCN is introducing its grid micro-circuits for the utility markets — allowing customers to achieve their needs for security, reliability and overall robustness,’ said Drolet.
PCN is a member of the UPA and also endorses the work of HomePlug — hoping that together all organizations will finalize a standard and thus meet the needs of customers worldwide in a large number of applications.
Drolet recently got involved with the GridWise Architecture Council (BT, 5/22 http://www.bpltoday.com/members/1126.cfm) and has for some time played a role with Utilimetrics (formerly AMRA) (BT, 10/16 http://www.bpltoday.com/members/1261.cfm) and the Modbus Organization, an association in support of the protocol put forth by Schneider Electric. For more information, contact: www.pcntechnology.com.
