KYZ Pulses - History and Outlook for the Future

KYZ Pulses are a clever and ingenious means of conveying instantaneous energy use information to other systems with no direct electrical contact, which will allow KYZ Pulse Metering to survive for decades into the future.  While it’s true that this methodology – which has been around for many decades – is being replaced in some applications by newer technologies, there are many reasons why KYZ Pulses continue to live on.

First and foremost, pulses are simple and universal.  General Electric pioneered this methodology early in the 20th century nearly at the start of the electric industry.  Pulses are based on a single-pole, double throw switch model (SPDT), where each closure is worth a designated about of energy.  It couldn’t be simpler to convey this instantaneous energy use information to other systems – usually customer energy management systems or demand response systems.  Pulse metering does not require any protocol or networking.  It is simply a switch closure that is generated each time the fixed amount of energy of a pulse is consumed by the customer.  In this way, kW Demand can be immediately calculated, and kWh energy usage can be monitored and recorded by a simple counter.

So who’s using KYZ pulses these days?  There are many utilities, customers and vendors that use pulses for customer-side-of-the-meter systems and telemetry.  Specifically, a large portion of the users of pulses are Demand Response Providers.  These companies install equipment at customer sites to reduce load when called upon by the utility or the system operator.  KYZ Pulse metering allows the demand response provider’s equipment to be agnostic to the meter.  They don’t care what brand of meter is installed, what the electrical service configuration is, or any details of the customer’s electric system.  The only thing they need is a pulse output on the electric meter and to know what the Pulse Value is – how much a pulse is worth in watt-hours or kilowatt-hours.  In this way the Demand Response Provider avoids the cost of another set of current transformers, potential transformers and a watthour transducer and likely other equipment which would be required to calculate the power and energy usage.  The cost savings are significant.  

Going forward, some meter manufacturers have eliminated hard-wired (physical) pulse outputs on their meters.  This could be argued to be a mistake, but new technologies are being born that generate the pulses externally from the meter.  Two such devices are SSI’s MPG-3 Zigbee Meter Pulse Generator and the WPG-1 Wifi Meter Pulse Generator.  These systems use RF links to the meter to obtain usage information every few seconds and generate pulses for the customer pulse equipment.  Check out these device on the Solid State Instruments website.