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Industry News
January 11, 2013
Energy-Harvesting-Powered Systems to Reach Tipping Point in 2013
2013 New Year's Power Celebration
The announcement last month by the ZigBee Alliance of "Green Power" as an optional feature for ZigBee PRO is one of the most-striking indications that battery-less, wireless systems are poised for a surge in growth. Until the ZigBee announcement, the options for deploying energy harvesting (EH) powered controls and sensors were limited, and so was the market potential of those devices. Prior to the ZigBee announcement, there were fewer than 50 companies seriously involved in the market for EH-powered devices. As a result of the news from ZigBee, today there are hundreds of companies involved in this area.
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In October of last year, ZigBee celebrated its first decade of successes, most notably in enabling the growing machine-to- machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) trends and providing utilities and energy service providers with new consumer energy management and efficiency capabilities. Hundreds of manufacturers have shipped hundreds of millions of ZigBee products for a variety of energy management, commercial and consumer applications, hence the importance of the ZigBee Green Power announcement in enabling the rapid-growth of EH-powered systems.
While the ZigBee announcement was a major step, it was only one of several important developments in the area of EH-power that have occurred recently. Another important standard announced in 2012 was ISO/IEC 14543-3-10 — for wireless applications with ultra-low power consumption. This standard was ratified by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and was claimed to be the first and only wireless standard that is also optimized for energy harvesting solutions. It lays the foundation for fully-interoperable, open wireless technology comparable to standards such as Bluetooth and WiFi. The new standard is geared to wireless sensors and wireless sensor networks with ultra-low power consumption.
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The changing and expanding standards landscape is only one of the significant developments that will drive EH products into the mainstream in 2013. A convergence of technologies will also be a major driver in the growth of this market. The power consumption needs of control and sensor systems is falling with each successive generation of semiconductor devices and the energy-delivery capabilities of energy harvesting systems is rising with successive generations. At the same time, the cost of wired systems continues to rise as basic materials such as copper wiring and installation costs (labor) continue to rise. Copper is being replaced with silicon. As a result, the energy harvesting market is well positioned for accelerated growth starting in 2013 and continuing over the next several years.
In addition, while energy harvesting is often described as a "battery-less" technology, in reality, in many applications energy harvesting will be used to run devices when they can, but then need to store excess energy for later use. Both primary and especially rechargeable batteries are seen as a concurrent and critical market with energy harvesting solutions.
Opinion: Maximising Synergies between Power Electronics and ICT for improving Energy Efficiency
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