This week the group of groups collaborating on the development of the “Smart Energy Profile 2 (SEP 2)” (the specification formally referred to as ZigBee Smart Energy Profile 2.0), announced a consortium for interoperability testing and certification of SEP 2 devices. This is not an earth shattering announcement, but is a useful reminder of the progress being made, as well as the distance yet to go, toward widespread Home Area Network deployment.

Recent posts described some of history and internal battles surrounding the development of a fully IP-based communications standard for home energy management devices such as programmable communicating thermostats, in-home energy displays, smart appliances, and energy gateways. Perhaps lost in the standards debates is recognition of the rather unprecedented cooperation between different groups driving toward a single standard defining the higher-level protocols of operations for these devices. These groups include the ZigBee Alliance, Wi-Fi Alliance, HomePlug Alliance, and HomeGrid Forum. Heck, anytime you can get the HomePlug and HomeGrid (G.hn) guys to agree to anything, it is a real achievement. The real benefit of leveraging IP is to allow interoperability across devices running on these different underlying protocols. The ZigBee Alliance deserves special recognition for taking the risk of opening up their original SEP 1.0 work in 2008 to other non-ZigBee protocols, effectively enabling their HAN competition.

My first reaction upon reading this interoperability consortium announcement was, “Haven’t they been doing this already?” Certainly, within the ZigBee community, certification test development and preliminary testing has been underway for many months. In fact, some of the results of these tests contributed to the disagreements discussed in earlier posts. But formalizing this type of certification testing for SEP 2 across the different network types is a good and important step.

As good as this is, the industry should be aware that even if this consortium develops a very strong certification program, this does not mean a slew of interoperable devices will be instantly deployable upon gaining certification. The experience with ZigBee and SEP 1.0 was an approximately two year journey between “certification” and dependable HAN field operation within the Texas smart meter deployments, which is really only starting now. The hope is SEP 2 can happen faster, but there are considerably more moving parts to coordinate.

This is a big reason why the recent smart grid plans filed by the big three California utilities with the CPUC are not promising significant HAN rollouts until 2013 and beyond, despite achieving critical mass of HAN-capable smart meter deployments now. This remains a bitter pill for many of the HAN companies formed in recent years, hoping for the “year of the HAN.” Late last year we said it would not be 2011. Perhaps we’ll have to wait until 2013. But at least we can still see it coming.