Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20110029461
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LATEST PRIOR ART
DISCUSSION
Noah Stern (about 2 years ago)
I could not find adequate prior art, but I know there is very similar technology that is connected to solar panels. The smart meters that are often installed with residential or commercial photovoltaic units can often calculate energy savings, cost savings and run this data through a central computing device to be transmitted to the internet so the consumer can view from a PC.
This is somewhat different from the claim, but there is obvious overlap. Aaron Alpert (about 2 years ago)
What seems to distinguish this invention from previous Smart Grid inventions is the following two features:
(1) The speed at which the system performs. It collects data, analyzes it, establishes a price, and reports that price to the consumer every 5 minutes. Considering the highly distributed nature of the grid system, that's a lot of data collection and analysis in a very short amount of time. There's a lot of opportunity for something to go wrong. Other inventions have seemingly solved the problem by collecting data relatively infrequently -- once a day, or so. Mr. Hardin's invention uses other, innovative approaches. For example, in Claim 2, he states that he only needs data from a handful of users in order to set the price. Using what is, in essence, a statistical sampling model is a clever solution. In Claims 7-10, he allows for different areas to receive that information differentially. For example, if there is more bandwidth in one area, it will communicate more with the system. This introduces the idea of differential reliability in the data transmission. Claim 12 establishes an "error counter" to counteract the effects of system lag, etc. Claim 20 again establishes the idea that each area, while functioning similarly, works with a different "schedule." All of this prevents the system from suffering a data overload.
(2) Other Smart Grid systems lump their customers together. Mr. Hardin seems to consider very small sub-groups of homes and deals with each of their rates differently. This is embodied in Claims 11, 19, and 20.PEER TO PATENT ACTIVITY
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