Cisco Powers Up Energy Management Tools for Utilities, Consumers, Businesses

New Home Solution and Enhanced Smart Connected Building Technologies Extend Smart Grid Offering to Reduce Consumption, Costs

| Source: Cisco Cisco

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwire - June 29, 2010) -  CiscoLive! -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today unveiled new technologies that build on its recently announced Connected Grid portfolio and help consumers and businesses better monitor and manage their energy consumption for cost and carbon savings, including an easy-to-use interface for the home environment. The Cisco® Home Energy Management Solution features a Home Energy Controller along with Cisco Energy Management Services that, when provided by utilities to their customers, are designed to help consumers securely and reliably gain insight into, and easier control over, their energy use.

Additionally, Cisco announced key updates to its Smart Connected Buildings portfolio, including the new Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager 6300, which enables centralized management of Smart Connected Buildings across global enterprise operations, and the new Cisco Network Building Mediator 3.1, which provides the platform for linking multiple disparate building automation systems and protocols over Internet Protocol and for allowing greater integration and visibility of energy flows across real estate and information technology. 

Facts / Highlights:

  • Cisco's believes that networking technology can change how the world manages its energy and environmental challenges. Cisco's vision is to enable an end-to-end, open standards-based, communications platform that supports new models of energy management. By working with utility customers and an ecosystem of partners, Cisco hopes to help create an energy infrastructure for the 21st century that brings about economic as well as environmental benefits.
  • As part of this vision, Cisco is announcing new demand-management tools that are a critical part of Cisco's Connected Grid offerings designed to address energy concerns and to help utilities more reliably and efficiently deliver power from generation to businesses and homes.

Solutions for the Home

  • The Cisco Home Energy Management Solution for utilities features the Home Energy Controller (CGH-100), a countertop display that helps the consumer make more informed choices, as well as set policies and schedules for energy use, based on real-time household, historic and individual appliance consumption. 
  • Through the Home Energy Controller's LCD touch screen, the consumer has insight into and control over peripheral devices that communicate with the HEC, such as thermostats, intelligent sockets and, ultimately, smart appliances like refrigerators and water heaters.
  • The Home Energy Controller coordinates the variety of networks in the home and supports associated networking protocols, such as ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Encoder Receiver Technology (ERT).
  • With the Cisco Home Energy Management Solution, utilities will be able to extend the benefits of their Smart Meter deployments by providing home owners with more detailed energy control and management, down to the appliance level. Customers and utilities can coordinate on new pricing and demand-side management services, enabling home automation for energy management.
  • Cisco is also announcing hosted Energy Management Services, which utilities can use to manage data from thousands of homes while integrating with their back-end applications. These complement Cisco's existing service offerings to help utilities plan, build and run a converged communications infrastructure for automating the Connected Grid.
  • The Cisco Home Energy Management Solution will be deployed by innovative utility customers such as Duke Energy, with which Cisco has a strategic collaboration to advance Smart Grid technology. 
  • Studies show that technology can promote better energy management by consumers. IDC found that customers reduce overall energy use by 4 to 15 percent when they receive real-time feedback on power consumption. Also, according to a study by Zogby International, 74 percent of Americans are likely to change their energy use if they are given the technology solutions to do so.
  • The Home Energy Controller is designed as a global solution but will be first available in North America beginning this summer. It is part of Cisco's new Connected Grid portfolio, an end-to-end approach to the smart grid, within which substation automation technologies were announced in May to help utilities better manage electricity transmission and distribution. 

Business Energy Management for Smart Connected Buildings

  • Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager 6300 is a significant component of Cisco's Smart Connected Buildings initiative to transform the way buildings are built, operated and experienced.
  • The new solution allows corporations to connect, monitor, aggregate and manage distributed networks of Cisco Network Building Mediators, and hundreds if not thousands of buildings, integrating building systems within a particular facility via a central enterprise portal.
  • By allowing organizations to centrally manage geographically dispersed buildings over an IP network, the Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager increases operational efficiencies in distributed facility management. This provides practical tools to reduce overall energy consumption and system downtime, and offers proactive system alerts for preventive maintenance of critical equipment.
  • Key features of the Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager include a global navigator that affords enterprise wide visibility of facility operations and presence for dispersed deployments, and global alarm monitoring capability for centralized event management.
  • Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager also includes tools for defining global schedules and set points that apply across all of an enterprise's facilities, offering standardization in facility operations and increasing efficiencies in facility management. Global and unified schedules can be uniformly applied across all facilities and subsystems.
  • Graphical equipment-status pages offer simple visibility into critical systems such as HVAC, lighting and metering.
  • In addition, the new Cisco Network Building Mediator 3.1 will offer superior performance features to optimize the power of the Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager 6300, including enhanced building automation protocol support; improved BACnet features and EIB (KNX/IP) protocol; support for enhanced security with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAMs); and integration with the Cisco EnergyWise API, in addition to the Cisco EnergyWise SNMP protocol.
  • In common with many new Emerging Technology solutions, Cisco has a focused and targeted go-to-market strategy for new solutions that are made available in phases for the global theaters.

Cisco and Customer Comments:

Paul Fulton, general manager, Cisco Prosumer Business Unit / Cisco Smart Grid
"Utilities around the world are moving toward a more modern, efficient and environmentally friendly energy infrastructure. Cisco's Home Energy Management Solution can be an integral part of that transition by helping utilities empower their customers to make choices about their consumption, understand the trade-offs related to time-of-use pricing, and be in better control of their energy efficiency. With its simple and elegant user interface, the Cisco Home Energy Controller is like a virtual energy assistant for consumers, giving them valuable information about, and more discretion over, their energy use. Cisco is excited to introduce this important addition to our Connected Grid portfolio." 

Sandeep Vij, vice president and general manager, Cisco Converged Building Systems Business Unit
"Business energy requirements in commercial buildings represent a large percentage of the world's overall energy consumption. Providing management, facilities and IT teams with clear, real-time visibility into the impact of energy flows is a first step toward managing buildings in a more intelligent way. Cisco is taking the Connected Grid vision several steps further with the new Cisco Network Building Mediator Manager, which allows small teams to take actionable decisions across multiple buildings and campuses using a simple interface. By enabling multiple, disparate building automation systems and protocols to be effectively monitored and managed over IP, Cisco is delivering on the network as the platform for sustainable management of real estate and IT."

Gianna Manes, senior vice president and chief customer officer, Duke Energy
"Home energy management functionality is an important step in providing customers with an enhanced energy experience that is simply not achievable with today's analog grid. Customers want to save money on their energy bills, but it has to be easy. With Cisco's proven expertise in Internet Protocol-based, open system networks, we're confident our collaboration with them will result in a solution that provides our customers back-of-mind simplicity and real, back pocket rewards."

Dave Shroyer, Senior Controls Engineer, NetApp
"We have been using the Cisco Network Building Mediator to integrate multiple building systems across areas such as HVAC, lighting and our data center operations.  As a result of using the Cisco solution together with an integrated utility program, we are now able to shed 1.1 megawatts of power in 20 minutes during demand response events. We look forward to being able to drive further value from our deployment through the greater integration with IT and scaling capabilities that the new Mediator Manager and platform updates provide."

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