ZigBee Smart Energy Version 2.0 Technical Documents Now Available for Comment

The Zigbee Alliance community members and the public are being asked to submit their comments on the Zigbee Smart Energy v2.0 revised technical documents and Public Application Profile. The new standard offers a range of new features including IP-based control for advance metering infrastructure and home area networks (HAN).  Over the next few weeks the alliance is hoping received feedback to take the standard forward.

ZigBee Smart Energy enables energy service providers and utilities to wirelessly communicate with and manage common household devices such as smart thermostats, in-home displays and smart appliances.  The Zigbee alliance offers certification programme for manufacturers developing connected home solutions to get their devices certified.  This offers Home builders implementing smart home solutions the guarantee that all certified Zigbee products are compatible, making them easy to install.

The Alliance works with businesses and other standardisation bodies involve in development and implementation of the smart grid infrastructure to create and develop standards for Machine to Machine (M2M) communication in the connected home and commercial premises.

Organisations involve in the consultation are electronic product manufacturers, meter manufacturers, utilities, chip makers; standardise bodies such the SunSpec Alliance, HomePlug Alliance, International Society of Automotive Engineers,  and Wi-Fi Alliance.

Version 2.0 will feature control of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) installation, charging, configuration and firmware download for HAN devices, prepay services, user information and messaging, load control, demand response and common information and application profile interfaces for wired and wireless HANs.

According to Zigbee, Version 2.0 will not replace ZigBee Smart Energy version 1, instead it will offer utilities and energy service providers another choice when creating their advanced metering infrastructure and home area networks (HANs) solutions.

For more information and a list of ZigBee Certified products, visit: www.ZigBee.org/SmartEnergy.