The single most important communications standard in the Smart Grid is the interface between smart meters and electricity consumers’ premises. And the winning standard for wireless links has likely emerged: ZigBee Smart Energy.

As successful deployments of tens of millions of smart meters in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific have shown, multiple proprietary and open protocols work well for two-way communications between utilities and meters. But the Smart Grid vision can’t be achieved without a single, open protocol from the meter to the premise.

The next big thing after smart meters is sending messages from those meters to in-home displays, smart thermostats, and smart appliances. These messages contain the usage, pricing, and control information that enable consumers to capture the desired smart meter and Smart Grid benefits of demand response, energy efficiency, renewables integration, distributed generation, and electric vehicle charging. And an open interface for sending those messages is essential for the free market to invent and deliver, at low cost, all sorts of exciting and creative products and services.

The Internet offers a great analogy: there are multiple ways to link a home or business to the Internet, but for wireless Internet communications within homes and businesses, we rely on a single protocol: wi-fi.

Why does it look like it’s game over for the HAN wireless standard? Because ZigBee Smart Energy is dominant among ongoing and planned installations. ON World, a research firm, reports that over 40 million smart meters with ZigBee wireless HAN interfaces are being installed around the world. This includes California, Texas, the UK, Australia, and many other locations. Over 350 companies – including the likes of General Electric – manufacture ZigBee devices.

Above all, NIST has endorsed ZigBee as a national, U.S. Smart Grid standard. See page 57 of the report