It was claimed that all the customers in UK will have smart meters installed by 2019. In the past five years I lived in Glasgow (Scotland) and Manchester (England) regions, it seems not many smart meters are being installed. I believe it is going to be the suppliers' task. Are they going to do it all over the country when approaching 2019?
In Italy and in some other EU countries, almost 99% customers have smart meters. Do these smart meters have real-time price function, which can benefit the customers and suppliers for demand response purposes?
If not, I believe current smart meters are only used to record the half-hourly demand. How do the suppliers or DNOs collect the data? Can the HH data be sent in real time so that the aggregation can be used for operation purposes?
Sorry for a bit long. Really appreciate if you contribute to any of them.
Regards
Chao
Dear Chao
Dont know too much about Europe but the Green Botton data collection project in the USA is willing field:
http://www.greenbuttondata.org/
http://energy.gov/articles/green-button-giving-millions-americans-better-handle-energy-costs
Smart meters play an important role not only in terms of network management in smartgrid but n the field of Big Data such data can be used to train artificially intelligent systems that can recognize trends and optimize networks through self-learning adaptive techniques:
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=SA&subtype=WH&htmlfid=IMW14628USEN
Perhaps someone from Europe can help give a little more of that perspective.
regards
Gerro
Dear Chao,
Currently in the UK there are around 1 million smart meters installed. The time frame for installing smart meters for "all" customers is the subject of quite controversial discussions. At present the roll-out is expected to be completed (to be read "desired to be completed") by 2020 (pushed from 2019).
Again, the 99% penetration of smart meters in countries like Italy can be debated. The definition of smart meters has evolved in the last decade and one task that took a long time to complete in the UK was setting the "Smart metering equipment technical specifications" or SMETS in short. SMETS2 was the latest version released.
I believe that most of those 99% smart meters do not have the functionalities necessary to communicate dynamic pricing information, being used mostly for automated meter reading. And those that do, they do not have the supporting infrastructure for dynamic pricing, i.e. even though the smart meters are equipped with this function, there is no system behind them to actually implement dynamic pricing schemes.
The HH data can be sent and subsequently used for network operation, but in this case there is also the need of an underlying system to manage incoming data.
Hope I covered all your questions.
Kind regards,
Ioana
Great! Many thanks, Gerro and Loana!
I also got the information that currently the HH data cannot be sent (or collected) very frequently. Typically once or twice a day, or even less. This means that for operation purposes, we should not assume we can get the previous HH data, but having the previous one-day data is more realistic.
Regards
Chao
Hi, Loana
Thanks for the comprehensive explanation. I have got another one.
If we look at the evolution of the electricity metering, different types of meters have been (or will be) used. (Please correct me if I am wrong)
1 Accumulation meter
2 Interval meter (also call it Automatic Metering Reading (AMR). One way communication, record HH data and send to supplier and/or DNOs monthly)
3 Smart meter (two-way communication, being capable of providing a real-time display of energy use and dynamic pricing information but may do not have the corresponding underlying system to support it as you say)
After checking the document you suggested "Smart metering equipment technical specifications", indeed smart meter refers to "3" which has the real-time price function rather than the AMR.
According to what you were saying, it seems the 99% installation in Italy was not very strict in the concept of "smart meter" (or because the concept is different) and most of these meters might be "AMR". Do you think for the UK case, it will be pretty strict that all the meters have to be real "smart meters", even the supporting infrastructure for dynamic price and/or frequent data aggregation are not available by 2020?
Many thanks and regards
Chao
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