Parks Associates has announced its latest market research effort titled, “Residential Energy Management: Company, Alliance & Technology Profiles,” is available for procurement, and said its most significant findings are that eight million smart meters have already been deployed in the U.S. and the associated Residential Energy Management (REM) market segment is almost guaranteed to sustain significant growth.

Research associates at the company claim the deployment of so many meters - with more in the pipeline, and the U.S. government extending its full support - is the first step for REM towards deploying Smart Grid technologies and advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) on a broad scale.

"Already over six percent of all U.S. meters are smart meters, and utilities throughout the U.S. are announcing new deployments and pilot programs daily," said Bill Ablondi, director of Home Systems Research at Parks Associates (News - Alert). "We completed the Profiles report to analyze current players in this area and identify how their deployments will impact growth in a variety of consumer digital lifestyle device and service categories."

Parks Associates said that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also called Federal Stimulus bill, has allotted $11 billion, of the total $63 billion towards energy, for smart grid initiatives till end 2010, and the public, private, and consumer factors are all driving this growth. The report covers Home Area Network (HAN) solutions, more than 60 relevant companies, about 10 alliances, component suppliers, metering solutions manufacturers, Smart Grid enablers, and technology enablers.

A “Smart Grid” has Internet connectivity so that signals can be sent and received for each and every connected and authorized device. For example, in this case, smart meters. In a broader sense, the Smart Grid concept creators envisaged that the entire grid would work more efficiently, accommodate wind and solar power, possibly lower electricity bills by optimizing electricity flow, and constantly reduce the carbon footprint.

The Department of Energy has decreed that Smart Grids must facilitate: Self-healing from power disturbance events ; Enabling active participation by consumers in demand response; Operating resiliently against physical and cyber attack; Providing power quality for 21st century needs; Accommodating all generation and storage options; Enabling new products, services, and markets; and, Optimizing assets and operating efficiently.

It is eventually anticipated that “Smart Grids” will migrate towards and become a part of the recently found expression, ‘The Internet of Things,’ which envisages that all devices and objects all over the world will eventually be connected together by an Internet Network. This system even includes books, cans and, well, anything and everything, and allows, for example, a person setting out for home from work to remotely activate water heating to have a warm, low carbon footprint bath on arrival and can even request a home aid robot to prepare a snack of sorts. The Internet of Things sees every individual being surrounded by at least 1,000 to 5,000 ‘connected’ objects, and the Internet itself should be able to encode and track 50 to 100,000 billion objects simultaneously.

Another catch word that somewhat applies to this scenario is ‘Hyperconnectivity,’ which according to Nortel (News - Alert), is achieved when the number of connectivity resources such as devices, nodes, and applications actually connected to the network outnumbers the consumers who use the network. The devices are as varied as PC’s, PDA’s, cell phones, iPods, cameras, sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, cars, appliances, medical equipment, industrial machinery, and even irrigation equipment on farmlands.