Driven by new regulation, a global energy crisis, advanced metering with embedded wireless sensor networks has grown from a few thousand units in 2004 to 1.5 million smart meters this year, according to ON World.

"While most of the revenues at this time are for smart meters, Home Area Network (HAN) applications and devices that interoperate with these advanced meters have enormous developer potential," says Mareca Hatler, ON World's director of research.

In a recent survey with nearly 100 utilities, ON World found that three quarters are using Automated Meter Reading (AMR) or planning AMR deployments within the next 18 months. Nearly half of these deployments will be for advanced metering infrastructure with two-way communications. In addition, 46% are planning a demand response program with dynamic pricing options.

To address dwindling energy capacity and growing demand, utilities are working with vendors to create energy management solutions to connect smart meters with in-home control devices. Leading U.S. utilities such as SCE, Centerpoint, TXU and SDPG&E are demanding vendor interoperability and have selected the ZigBee standard for these energy saving solutions. Utilities are working together with vendors such as Itron, Cellnet+Hunt, Comverge and Tendril Networks to create a ZigBee AMI profile that will leverage several years of development on the recently completed ZigBee Home Automation Profile. The ZigBee AMI profile is expected to be completed in early 2008.

In 2012, there will be a total possible market of 276 million HAN devices worldwide based on forecasts for two-way AMI enabled electric meters and the average number of HAN devices to be deployed per household.

These devices include smart outlets and programmable thermostats that are wirelessly networked to the utility through the resident's smart meter and automatically adjust energy use to give the consumer preferred pricing.

ON World projects that the global Wireless Sensor Networking smart meter and demand response market will be worth $1.6 billion in 2011.