Consumer Connected Demand Response™ - Broadband

Energate's Consumer Connected Demand Response (CCDR) is an innovative solution set designed to meet the needs of a Demand Response industry in transition. Energate works in collaboration with Utilities to ensure that technology adapts to their specific needs and program goals.

The CCDR solution is configurable as two-way DR over Broadband, which is represented in the diagram.

The Broadband solution works by communicating between the utility and the home over the consumer’s high speed internet access. Each consumer home is equipped with load control devices (smart thermostats, load switches), and an Energate ZIP Connect, which bridges from the IP (Ethernet) network to a ZigBee Smart Energy Profile network in the home for device control.

The ZIP Connect has been carefully designed to allow truly “plug and play” installation. Connecting to an open port on the consumer’s router, the ZIP Connect automatically tunnels through a consumer firewall and establishes a highly secure socket with Energate CORE servers for communication to and from the home. This connection is robust and automatically re-establishes itself if internet access is interrupted for any reason.

The broadband communications option offers a number of benefits to both the utility and the consumer because of the high speed and capacity of this connection.

• Instantaneous control, measurement, and verification of load control events
• Automatic awareness of available demand response resources
• Secure, encrypted 2-way communications to the home
• Ability to offer an advanced consumer web portal to customers
• Extensive communications and device diagnostic capabilities for customer support
• Long term value – the ZIP Connect can also communicate with AMI meters to bring high resolution consumption data from the home to the utility or consumer portal.