Towards Smart Grids: eMeter CEO Cree Edwards (Part 2)

SM: How long did you stay with Octel?

CE: After nine months I took the idea I had about a computer inside the meter to Pacific Gas and Electric. I showed them the concept and asked them if they would buy it if I built it, and of course they said yes. We decided to raise some money, and it took us about six months to do so. The initial investor was a subsidiary of Arizona Public Service in Phoenix. They put in several million dollars, and we began engineering computers that would go inside meters.

SM: What would that do to the pricing structure? Meters are pretty inexpensive devices, and at that time computers were a bit expensive.

CE: We could build it and sell it profitably for less than $100 installed. GE and Westinghouse build enormous things that cost $500. We took state-of-the-art technology and reduced the smarts in the meter down to a single ASIC chip.

The meter is a disc that spins because of a magnetic field created by the flow of energy. We put a black stripe on the bottom of the disk and put two LEDs there. We would then count the stripe as it went by. This was fairly innovative at the time.

SM: Was all of this out of your brain?

CE: Mine and Larsh’s.

SM: You knew enough about electronics to make this happen?

CE: I knew enough about electronics to get Larsh to do the work! The concept was mine but the implementation was his. We made those things under a company called DAC, which stood for Domestic Automation Company. Our focus was to get the information and get it to customers. We sold hundreds of thousands of those across the country as standalone devices.

After two or three years, we realized that the challenge was not only getting the data from the meter, it was getting it into the utility system and then back out to the customer. In the late ’80s Larsh and I spun out a different group and created a communication system. Those meters communicated optically through the glass. A person would walk up to the meter, put a probe in front of the glass, and data would be exchanged between this handheld device and the meter.

SM: So it was still a manual process that required someone to walk around?

CE: Yes, but that was all there was back then so it worked. We developed a proprietary communication network. DAC morphed into a company called CellNet Data Systems. We built a really interesting two-layer communication system in a cellular structure. There was a local area network that used a spread spectrum radio to get the last hundred yards between a meter and a pole top. Pole-top devices would capture the data and communicate it back over a wide area network. There was no cellular network for a wide area network then, so we literally created both networks, including all the protocols and communication handoffs. There were some incredibly innovative ways to handle bandwidth. Back then they were selling bandwidth by auctioning off chunks for cellular systems.

SM: What year was that?

CE: It was in the late 1980s. It was when McCaw was buying large chunks of cellular properties, so the value of bandwidth was enormously high. We would take a 25 kilohertz channel and break it up into 10 two-and-a-half kilohertz sub channels and create a cellular digital grid that would cover an entire service territory and could bring all of this data back.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Towards Smart Grids: eMeter CEO Cree Edwards
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