Earlier in October, Utility Dive visited GridWeek 2012 in Washington, D.C., and we talked to a number of experts, including Wi-Fi Alliance Technical Director Greg Ennis, about the state of technology and the grid.

We also spoke with ZigBee Alliance Chairman Bob Heile, a data communications and wireless data veteran with more than two decades of experience working with technology and standards.

As a non-profit association working to achieve global standards for devices, ZigBee and its individual members have a vested interest in the future of home automation, wireless communications and other areas where choices are being made as smart grid plans get implemented internationally.

Heile offered his perspective on tech rollouts in the U.S. and abroad, as well as where he sees ZigBee Smart Energy playing a role and how he knows there is progress being made. Here is a shortened version of our GridWeek conversation with him:

UTILITY DIVE: What can you tell me today about what ZigBee is up to and what your hoping to see happen with utilities right now?

BOB HEILE: The alliance was set up to establish global standards for wireless sensor networks. That was the whole progenitor leading up to its formation. We had things like Bluetooth, which is great for wireless headsets. We had things like Wi-Fi, which is great for wireless local area networks. But you get into the problem, "How do I really create vast internet of things? How do I interconnect large numbers of devices easily and cost effectively that don’t need to move a lot of data around?"

If I put an 802.11 radio in every one of these lights [gestures toward the ceiling], the system would crash and burn from self-interference. I need a low-duty cycle—lots of important things. That’s what it set out to do. It’s a standards organization at its core.

I know that ZigBee does a lot of education work as far as standards go. Where does that come in?

HEILE: You don’t do standards just because it’s fun—you do them because there’s value. There’s some set of values that you really want to achieve, and if that value is going to be achieved then people have to know about what you’re doing.

So there is an educational component associated with it. We now are 400-plus companies worldwide who are entity members of the organization—so therefore part of the process—either have plans or are in the process of developing products, or are very active, either in the internal networking that goes on in standards communities or in the standards development. So it’s a very engaged, active community.

It’s really been out for six years, but really in high volume deployment since 2006—the whole networking side of it. We now have nine application areas that run on this. We’ve divided the standards problem up into two pieces. Piece No. 1 was "How do things talk to each other?"

You can’t set large numbers of radios up manually. I mean, when I said large numbers I’m talking tens of thousands of radios in a building. And if you say, “Naw, that’ll never happen!”

Well, of course. Go to New York!

HEILE: Go to New York, go to Las Vegas. Aria in Las Vegas has got a 135,000 ZigBee radios and they’re controlling everything in that building. One building—135,000 radios! That’s not something you can set up manually, it’s got to be self-organizing. And even more important than self-organizing has got to be self-healing, because things change.

There were a number of attributes that were essential that got satisfied, so we set up a basic local networking capability, the thing that sets up the mesh network, the self-organizing and all that stuff, and that lets devices talk to each other.

And the way the network functions is that I don’t even know where every device is, I just need to know where two or three devices are—or one device around me. And if I’ve got a message for somebody, I send it to the device I see. I say, “Hey, I got a message for Carl. Do you know where Carl is?” And that device says, “No, I don’t know where Carl is but I know Mike over there. I’ll go ask him.” And that’s the way a Mesh network works.

Usually within five hops—and usually within three—you find your destination. It’s incredible. It’s one of those interesting statistics. You keep track of that, and now you know the route, so you can calculate it back. Mesh networks are very good for reliability and robustness. That was step 1.

What was the second step?

HEILE: Just because devices can talk to each other, doesn’t mean they know what they’re saying. You could be talking Chinese, and I could be talking English. The networks, the phone system, we know we’re passing data because I can hear you, but there's no comprehension.

So the other aspect of the standards piece was coming up with a group of standardized applications. In other words. what is the device, how does it talk? What is a switch, how do I define on and off? And you go through this whole series of things to create a set of standards.

The way the market found it easier to think about was to divide it up into logical verticals. So we have home automation, we have commercial building automation, we have retail, we have telecom, we have health care, we have consumer electronics—so there’s a bunch of them. What flowed out of that, which was very interesting, is that one of the first applications we introduced was home automation—sort of the obvious first thing that companies wanted to do. What flowed out that, within months of releasing that, the energy industry started to get interested because they said, "You know, here’s a system that’s already automatically controlling heating and air conditioning, it’s controlling the lights, it’s controlling other loads. If we could just be a part of that, then we would now have the ability to do demand response."

So this was 2006?

HEILE: It was 2006. It’s amazing to think that six years ago now, right about this time. In fact, one of the pivotal meetings was [when] someone from Southern California Edison spoke and framed the problem at an energy event in Knoxville, Tenn., six years ago and indicated there might be an opportunity to do this. And that launched a very aggressive standards effort in 2007.

All the automation elements were there, but what was missing was how do I do the advanced metering infrastructure? How do I do the automated meter reading? How do I do the messaging? How do I establish a secure link because I’ve got connections to the grid side of stuff now? So a number of things.

That resulted in a very aggressive effort, and that was like herding cats in 2007 because there were a lot of competitors at the table. But the result was in 2008 we introduced ZigBee Smart Energy, and that is still today the go-to standard for the energy application—time of day pricing, starting to work its way into renewables, the photovoltaics, electric vehicles, a number of other kinds of stuff related to loads.

So how would you evaluate where things are at right now?

HEILE: For ZigBee, as a standards organization, things go as they go. In some respects, it’s not like we’ve got products to sell, and it's not like we have a revenue stream to worry about. Our mission is "Are we providing the mechanics [so] that companies can create useful standards?" As the industry though, the member companies of course want standards because they see standards as an opportunity to build big markets, and big markets means better revenue. There’s still a few holdouts that think proprietary is better, but standards really build the market. From our perspective what happened, actually from the companies that are engaged in this process, things were going great in the U.S. during the stimulus era.

Sure, that's what made a lot of these smart grid technology rollouts possible.

HEILE: Literally, as soon as soon as that dried up, so did the forward progress.

So you had no stimulus money and economic meltdown and just a bunch of things that brought us back into what I call reality. In a way, I'm not sure the stimulus thing was a good idea only, because it artificially masked perhaps what needed to be done at the same time. So today, frankly, things are, I’ll use the word, “stalled” but stalled that means moving slowly. That’s not stopped.

At the same time, do you think a big rollout of AMI technology would have happened on the scale that it did without the stimulus?

HEILE: Well, it has. I mean, 40 million meters have been installed. The U.K. is now launching into an install that’s even bigger than that, so I mean that part’s great. Australia—I mean, if I take a look at where this stuff is getting used, in terms of generating the raw capability in terms of the meter side of it—man! I mean, it's just awesome! But are we getting any benefit out it? Nope.

And what do you think needs to happen to derive benefit?

HEILE: Let’s talk the U.S. In the U.S, I think the utilities now are challenged with—they basically have to do it on their own. There’s no stimulus money. And what’s the incentive?

Do you see international smart grid technology rollouts having a positive impact in the U.S.?

HEILE: The problem will unfold on different dimensions, slowly in other countries, so I think if we can put all the pieces together, we’ll get one whole one. And China’s very focused on the transmission and distribution side. The U.S. is very focused on the home-area networking and demand-response side. The U.K. might actually set the benchmark for Europe and might become the poster child for the plan. I thought for a while that might be Australia but I think the U.K. might beat Australia out. But I don’t think it will be the U.S. that will be setting the stage on this.

And we’ve got interesting new initiatives now that, I think, have the potential, like IEC PC118, which is focused on demand response, and it’s very SGIP [Self-Generation Incentive Program]-like. I mean it has much of the same charter as what SGIP was set up to do, but it’s IEC [International Electrotechnical Commission], not U.S. You know, this is not U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology.

And what is Zigbee’s role in that? Is it gathering support?

HEILE: Zigbee is working very closely with the U.S. National Committee, the China National Committee, a couple of the European country bodies, as well as IEC in "What can we do about moving ZigBee Smart Energy in as a part of that solution? Are there things we can do to contribute to some sort of a global initiative here?" That might have some nice impact here in terms of moving this beyond just a U.S. or North American kind of thing. And not just the ZigBee thing—I mean, just really understanding some common problems in demand response of which ZigBee’s got some standards that are part of the solution along with a bunch of others.

What signs would you point to that that is happening?

HEILE: Well, just the fact that something like that now exists—God only knows there’s enough smart grid activities going on in the world. But I kind of look to an organization like IEC as perhaps a little bit more agnostic orientation.

Is there anything else you’d point out that ZigBee has been doing specifically here at GridWeek?

HEILE: No, but because of the Smart Energy, we’re sort of integral to a lot of things. A hilarious thing happened at a panel yesterday afternoon. It was a morning panel and George Arnold was moderating it. I had to pop out to do a briefing and I popped back in towards the end. I was standing at the back, because the room had filled up by then. I was standing, leaning against the back wall, and the person from AM, the Association of Home Appliance manufacturers, made mention of Smart Energy and when the 2.0 version was going to be completed. It was like all five panelists—all in synchrony—all the heads cranked around and stared straight at me. So it was very clear the role that we play. We play a very important role in a lot of these solutions.

Are there any surprises you’ve heard here this week?

HEILE: Not real surprises. Just more confirmation of just how sluggish—I mean, if you listen to a lot of the stuff here, people are talking their theories and the possibilities, but there’s very little discussion of "This is my learning, this is what I’ve gotten out of my data analytics." It’s still very theoretical, rather than what I’ll call practical. And it’s just testimony of what we’ve just been talking about.

You can find out more about the ZigBee Alliance at ZigBee.org.

Would you like to see more utility and energy news like this in your inbox on a daily basis? Subscribe to our Utility Dive email newsletter! You may also want to read Utility Dive's interview with Wi-Fi Alliance Technical Director Greg Ennis.