Power Measurement Ltd.

Cd Power Measurement Limited

Douglas Stephen Ransom

J Bradford Forth

Michael Edward Teachman

Ronald G Hart

Andrew W Blackett

David A Chivers

Martin A Hancock

Jeffrey W Yeo

Eric K Haight

Chuen Shan Ki

Gregory R Loucks

Olaf Ow Dravnieks

Simon H Lightbody

Markus F Hirschbold

Peter C Cowan

John C Van Gorp

Stewart John Harding

Benedikt T Huber

David W Giles

Arthur B Wynans

Daniel Alan Cumming

Daniel J Wall

Hal Etheridge

Marcus Gasper

Thomas Stewart Stevenson

Chuen Shan Simon Ki

Anthony J Howe

Brian T Nakagawa

Theresa M Köster

Jeffery W Johnson

Stephen S Kuperman

Andres W Blackett

A power management architecture for an electrical power distribution system, or portion thereof, is disclosed. The architecture includes multiple intelligent electronic devices ('IED's') distributed throughout the power distribution system to manage the flow and consumption of power from the system. The IED's are linked via a network to back-end servers. Security mechanisms are further provided which protect and otherwise ensure the authenticity of communications transmitted via the network in furtherance of the management of the distribution and consumption of electrical power by the architecture. In particular, public key cryptography is employed to identify components of the architecture and provide for secure communication of power management data among those components. Further, certificates and certificate authorities are utilized to further ensure integrity of the security mechanism.

System and method for assigning an identity to an intelligent electronic device

A power management architecture for an electrical power distribution system, or portion thereof, is disclosed. The architecture includes multiple intelligent electronic devices ('IED's') distributed throughout the power distribution system to manage the flow and consumption of power from the system using real time communications. Power management application software and/or hardware components operate on the IED's and the back-end servers and inter-operate via the network to implement a power management application. The architecture provides a scalable and cost effective framework of hardware and software upon which such power management applications can operate to manage the distribution and consumption of electrical power by one or more utilities/suppliers and/or customers which provide and utilize the power distribution system. Autonomous communication on the network between IED's, back-end servers and other entities coupled with secure networks, themselves interconnected, via firewalls, by one or more unsecure networks, is facilitated by the use of a back-channel protocol. The back-channel protocol allows a device coupled with a secure network to solicit communications from a device on the unsecure network, thereby opening a back-channel through the firewall through which the unsecure network device may send unsolicited messages to the secure network device. Communications between multiple secure networks is accomplished using a unsecure device on an intermediary unsecure network to relay communications between the secure network devices using the protocol described above.

Push communications architecture for intelligent electronic devices

A system and method for detecting and responding to device tampering in an Energy Management ('EM') device is disclosed. The EM device is provided with mechanisms to detect and indicate unauthorized tampering with the device. Further, in response to detected unauthorized tampering, the device may take actions to protect the integrity of data generated by the device as well as protect any confidential data stored within the device. Such actions may include preventing further device operation, generating warnings to the device owner/user, marking subsequently generated data as suspect, destroying stored confidential data, etc.

System and method for seal tamper detection for intelligent electronic devices

An application for determining energy drivers is disclosed. The application analyzes quantity metadata and energy usage data to determine at least one relationship. The quality of the relationship between quantity metadata and energy usage data is further assessed. Based on the determined relationship and the assessed quality, the energy driver is identified.

Identifying energy drivers in an energy management system

A power quality analysis system includes a combination of at least one of a power quality parameter value, power quality event properties, non-power quality properties, and time properties. The parameter value and other properties is used to create power quality information that is descriptive of power quality events. The power quality information is easily configured and organized based on the desired options in order to make it more understandable and usable.

System and method for power quality analytics

A power management architecture for an electrical power distribution system, or portion thereof, is disclosed. The architecture includes multiple electronic devices distributed throughout the power distribution system to manage the flow and consumption of power from the system using real time communications. Power management application software and/or hardware components operate on the electronic devices and the back-end servers and inter-operate via the network to implement a power management application. The architecture provides a scalable and cost effective framework of hardware and software upon which such power management applications can operate to manage the distribution and consumption of electrical power by one or more utilities/suppliers and/or customers which provide and utilize the power distribution system. Autonomous communication on the network between IED's, back-end servers and other entities coupled with secure networks, themselves interconnected, via firewalls, by one or more unsecure networks, is facilitated by the use of an XML firewall using SOAP. SOAP allows a device to communicate without knowledge of how the sender's system operates or data formats are organized.

System and method for routing power management data via XML firewall

An Enterprise Energy Management ('EEM') software system is disclosed that displays EEM data and allows a user to interact with the data to better understand and manage their electrical system. The EEM software system collects real-time, near real-time and historical input data from various data sources, creates useful information from that data by filtering and isolating relevant data and performing analytics on the data, displays that data to the user in an easy to understand format, and allows the user to interact with the displayed data. The EEM software allows the user to perform what-if analysis, make changes in their system and verify results of those changes. The graphical user interfaces provide context sensitive and relevant guidance to novice and expert users.

Human machine interface for an energy analytics system

A power management architecture for an electrical power distribution system, or portion thereof, is disclosed. The architecture includes multiple intelligent electronic devices ('IED's') distributed throughout the power distribution system to manage the flow and consumption of power from the system. The IED's are linked via a network to back-end servers. Power management application software and/or hardware components operate on the IED's and the back-end servers and inter-operate via the network to implement a power management application. The architecture provides a scalable and cost effective framework of hardware and software upon which such power management applications can operate to manage the distribution and consumption of electrical power by one or more utilities/suppliers and/or customers which provide and utilize the power distribution system. Security mechanisms are further provided which protect and otherwise ensure the authenticity of communications.

System and method for securing energy management systems

A system and method are disclosed for providing authentication of data source and integrity between applications and users in different Non Affiliated Entities/organizations while limiting access to resources between private networks of energy management devices. A Non Affiliated Entity ('NAE') is an organization, individual or group of entities that may share some information with each other but are not closely tied, such as a group of competitor utilities. In conducting their operations, two or more applications or organizations (NAEs) may not fully trust one another, but wish to share some EM data and resources. These NAEs identify users, such as EM devices, using a 'federated security' scheme that may be based on Kerberos, which allows users from one NAE to be identified to another NAE. Web service security can be combined with federated security based authentication and access control to provide for secure exchange of EM data between users of different NABs. Federation is a technology and business agreement whereby users (including non-human users such as EM devices and EM software) that are part of a single or separate organization are able to interact through a system of authentication that allows for distributed processing, data sharing and resource sharing.

System and method for federated security in an energy management system

An energy monitoring device including procedures for secure communication of data from the device is disclosed. The energy monitoring device includes a public/private key pair used to encrypt and/or digitally sign communications by the device. This allows the receivers of these communications to authenticate the communications to ensure that the device and/or communications have not been compromised. The energy monitoring device is further capable of communications via an ad-hoc 'mesh' network, thereby facilitating communications among devices which are substantially inaccessible due to either physical or economic limitations.

Methods and apparatus for retrieving energy readings from an energy monitoring device

A power management architecture for an electrical power distribution system that includes multiple intelligent electronic devices ('IED's') distributed throughout the power distribution system to manage the flow and consumption of power from the system is disclosed. The IED's are linked via a network. Power management application components operate on the IED's, and inter-operate via the network to implement a power management application. The architecture provides a secure framework of hardware and software upon which such power management applications can operate to manage the distribution and consumption of electrical power by one or more utilities/suppliers and/or customers which provide and utilize the power distribution system. In particular, each IED is capable of establishing multiple encryption keys that confer different access rights on the IED. The encryption keys affect access to commands that the IED receives and restricts access to communications that the IED sends out over the network.

Energy management device and architecture with multiple security levels

A power management architecture for an electrical power distribution system, or portion thereof, is disclosed. The architecture includes multiple intelligent electronic devices ('IED's') distributed throughout the power distribution system to manage the flow and consumption of power from the system. The IED's are linked via a network to back-end servers. Power management application components operate on the IED's, the back-end servers and inter-operate via the network to implement a power management application. The architecture provides a scalable and cost effective framework of hardware and software upon which such power management applications can operate to manage the distribution and consumption of electrical power by one or more utilities/suppliers and/or customers which provide and utilize the power distribution system. In particular, each IED is capable of incrementally generated or consuming communicated XML documents containing power management data without having to buffer the complete XML document is memory before, during or after processing.

System and method for implementing XML on an energy management device

An object oriented architecture is used within individual monitoring units. The monitoring devices include circuitry which receives an electrical signal and generates at least one digital signal representing the electrical signal. Objects within such individual monitoring units include modules which perform a function and registers which contain the inputs, outputs and setup information for the modules. Methods can be invoked on all objects to change or query the operation or configuration of the device. At least one of the modules receives the digital signal as an input and uses the signal to generate measured parameters. Additional modules take measured parameters as input and generate additional parameters therefrom. The module may be linked in an arbitrary manner to form arbitrary functional blocks.

Growing community of inventors

Victoria, Canada

Douglas Stephen Ransom