15,000 smart homes planned for NSW  

The Australian has a report on Energy Australia's smart grid progress in NSW - 15,000 smart homes planned for NSW.

POWER company EnergyAustralia will rely on Ericsson technology to deliver the first national smart grid, in a deal worth up to $12 million.

Ericsson will provide equipment, software and services as EnergyAustralia turns 15,000 NSW households into smart homes.

The utility will conduct a privacy impact assessment to ease concerns that information held on smart meters could be hijacked by thieves and direct marketing companies.

Internet giant Google has been in hot water for inadvertently accessing private data from its Street View vehicles as they travelled around Australia and other countries collecting mapping information.

Homes in Newcastle, Scone, Newington, Sydney CBD and Ku-ring-gai will rely on fourth-generation wireless communications network that will use Wimax and long-term evolution (LTE) platforms.

Wimax and LTE will be used to transmit data between 200 major substations, and 12,000 smart sensors and 3000 mobile devices at 150 sites.

The utility will be able to pinpoint faults in its network and provide real-time alerts to customers on power use.

Ultimately, this could lead to lower energy consumption in homes, especially in an era of spiralling power costs.

EnergyAustralia has rolled out 800km of fibre-optic cable. The "last mile" of its network will rely on 4G technologies.

The company is rolling out the Wimax network, and LTE trials at 15 sites will begin next year, said Adrian Clark, the manager of EnergyAustralia's intelligent networks.