Bob is a 20-plus year veteran in the eld of data communications and wireless data. He is Chairman of the ZigBee Alliance, chair of the IEEE  802.15 Working Group on WPANs, and a founding member of 802.11. Before assuming the leadership of the ZigBee Alliance, Bob was doing Wireless Communications Consulting for several high-prole companies. Before that Bob was with GTE/BBN responsible for Wireless Opportunity Business Development, with the mission of commercializing wireless ad hoc networking and wireless PAN technologies. In 1990 he was a co-founder of Windata, Inc., an early developer of WLANs. From 1980-1990, Bob was with Motorola Codex, as VP/GM of the company’s modem business. Bob holds a BA from Oberlin College, and an MA and Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University.

Treat me like I was a 5-yr old. Could you please explain what does Zigbee do, how do you do it, and where are you heading?

Zigbee is an alliance of over 300 companies worldwide. We are a global organization. We exist to write standards for wireless sensors and control networks. A sensor is a thermostat or something that measures light levels. What you want to do is have something so cheap and easy that I can put these sensors in everything, every door, light switch, window, motion detector, or heat detector. Then, I have a real simple way to have all these things talk to each other. And from that, I can tell you important things like are there people in the room? Is this room at a comfortable temperature? Do I have to worry about security? Any number of things that would help improve our lifestyle, make our lives more efficient. That's why this is so interesting for the world of energy because I now have this very nice, cost effective network, where I can go in and do a better job of managing our environment. That's what Zigbee is all about. We create the standards to do all this in an open, competitive basis all over the world.We do all this through member companies, just like every standards organization can have individual members, or sometimes they have company members. We have company members. We are like the Consumer Electronics Association. Companies join and earn voting rights in part of the standards process, and people attend our meetings from those companies. Through their work and collaboration, we build ideas, consensus, and vote. Then, that will result in something that people can build and use.

Following on that question, what metric do you use to determine if you have succeeded in your long term vision?

At the end of the day, success is measured by the number of people who use it. Right now, we are very excited because a lot of people are starting to use it. We now have over 40 million electric meters in North America. We just had a major announcement from the Continua Health Alliance selecting Zigbee as their low powered LAN technology for use in their medical appliances. We'll see volume for that. Earlier this year, we announced the merger of the RF4CE consortium with the Zigbee alliance, which will now bring Zigbee into every remote control that's shipped with consumer electronics. We are talking about millions and millions of devices. DoE and NIST have named Zigbee as one of the 16 standards that should be used in the early developments of smart grid. Smart grid technology. Energy technology. Healthcare technology. Consumer electronics. They all have said they want Zigbee. And that is kind of exciting. That is the first measure of success. Next measure is getting all those products out there and getting all those people to use it.


Zigbee recently announed a partnership with ESMIG (european smart metering industry group) to define standards. Your goal to maximize benefits of a standardized smart metering program for consumers, utility service providers, and the environment. Could you please say a few words about this partnership?

What the Alliance does is listen to our member community and determine what that means in terms of the standards that are needed. In North America, we work closely with the North American utilities, metering manufacturers, regulators, NIST, and we made good progress here. Europe has a very interesting problem. The companies there have been ahead of the U.S. for a very long time in energy policy. What they are missing is a common policy around all the European unions. Last year, the EU said we needed a common energy policy over all the European nations. Europe is a country that has spent a lot of money in building out advanced infrastructure. In some respects, what the EU is facing is more complicated than in the U.S. because of having to integrate all that. We are starting from scratch. Nobody has any stake in it. But the EU has to pull together many different positions that are already underway. ESMIG is there to really help this process of finding all the common elements. Things that will help the country come together and unify around a single strategy. Now, Zigbee in its partnership with ESMIG will look at that and determine what is needed in terms of standards or capabilities. How well will Zigbee smart energy meet the needs of pulling together a common policy in Europe? Or if there are some holes ,what are they so we can figure out what we need to do to fill those? That's are involvement - it's to figure how the standards we are working on will help that process in Europe. If we're right, then the same thing that has happened here will happen there. Success will be measured by people saying that they are going to use that.


For the benefit of our readers who are new in this space, in a few words, can you describe what exactly is the Zigbee smart energy profile and what is its purpose?

Smart energy was started because the energy industry was looking for a way to gain control over loads (electric consumption) in residential environments. That was a very big problem. They had ways to get to commercial accounts because there were fewer of them. They would setup contracts with them so that on a hot summer afternoon when there were peak load events, they could call up Berkeley, and say "I need you to shed 200 kilowatt hours." They could make three or four phone calls and get a huge amount of load reduced to cover the peak demand in the afternoon. What's happening now is that is not enough. Over 50% of the electricity usage winds up in residential environments. But there are millions of customers there, and you can't call up millions of people at 2 o'clock in the afternoon and say, "can you turn off the lights?" All of a sudden, they saw this as an opportunity for using Zigbee home automation. If they could talk to those networks, they could start to do important things on controlling demand under heavy load conditions. That sounds simple. And it didn't require anything new. But if you start to look at all the other pieces you needed, they needed a way of making their communication totally secure. They needed a way to ensure that the customer got the pricing information for electricity. They needed a way you could send messages to your customer. That is what Smart energy is all about. It doesn't replace or exchange any of the profiles for home automation. What it does is it defines all the metering elements. It defines how I pass pricing information to you. It defines how I can talk to you and how you can talk to me. It defines all these things. Now you and the utility can have a partnership where you can be more intelligent in buying and using electricity. That is what Smart energy does. That is what it implements.


Continuing on the subject of Zigbee Smart Energy, I understand there is also a Zigbee enabled certification program which you talked about in your "Energy Efficiency using Zigbee Smart Energy" workshop. Could you please describe the testing process?

When we write any one of these standards, part of the job is to write a test program. A test case that allows anybody who uses that standard to perform a series of tests that if successful means they've implemented it correctly. We write that test program as part of the standard. That is done with the help of test houses like TUV, NTS, and KTL. Once that is all done, if i'm a product manufacturer what i can do is go to one of those test houses privately and the test house "uses" that program. They all use the same one. It's very uniform. It doesn't make a difference which one you use. The test program is designed to not be too complicated but at the same time not too light that it doesn't catch any problems. You try to strike a good balance of just enough so that all the products that pass those tests will work with other manufacturer's products that do the same thing. That's what it's all about. When we release a standard, we go through a very elaborate testing process to make sure these procedures work. We'll get 3, 4, or sometimes 10 manufacturers together, make sure that all their products work with each other, and that all their test results are consistent. Then we release it and the system can then work by itself.


In your workshop, you mentioned some of your current projects underway like South Edison, Goteborg Energiu Building Zigbee net, and TXU energy broadband. Could you please talk about your projects in more detail?

Oh, there's probably a dozen or so currently in progress. There's Detroit Edison, Pepco in the Washington DC market, Progress Energy in the Carolinas. What we're seeing is all the leading edge utilities in North America who have the biggest energy problems are now piloting using Zigbee smart energy as their automatic metering infrastructure. They are figuring out, what are the issues in putting it in? Getting the information they need to build their rate cases to file with their local state regulators. At the core, they are all working on very similar activities. They are all about putting in smart meters to get demand response, load control capabilities, convert energy usage from fixed price to a time-of-use price, and figuring out what are all the steps needed to make it happen. And Zigbee smart energy is the only standardized way anywhere in the world to do that. That is why it's so popular.


What are your predictions when this interoperability standard will come into fruition?

Well, by the end of this year, we should see somewhere in the range of 5-10 million meters installed in the U.S. It's happening now.


Any parting words to take away for the cleantech community? Opportunities for Entrepreneurs?

I think this is a market very rich for innovation and new ideas. For instance, software applications that can help consumers become more intelligent buyers and users of electricity. In-home display. I've seen some interesting products that combine in-home displays with digital photo frames. There's just a whole bunch of fun and interesting ideas I can use to supply products into this or provide a service opportunity. This is a very exciting time. And you add into all this the whole stimulus package. That's going to increase the innovation and creativity because I think everybody sees an opportunity. It's going to be very rewarding in terms of the results it produces, but likewise, it's going to be a very exciting time from a business and economic and perspective as well.