Energy giants give users more control over their consumption
British Gas and E.ON talk about the technology behind their respective smart meter rollouts
All UK utility companies are busy behind the scenes testing and piloting the technical infrastructure that will underpin the smart metering rollouts demanded by DECC, though whether we can rely on the vested interests of suppliers and manufacturers alone to come up with interoperable, easily interchangeable systems remains to be seen.
Centrica-owned British Gas expects to roll out a further 60,000 smart meters to its business customers before the end of 2011, taking the total to almost 200,000 across the UK. The company has also said it plans to deliver two million smart meters to its residential customers by the end of 2012, each of which will have up to four devices installed: two smart meters, an in-home display showing usage information and a communications link that transmits data between the various devices and back to British Gas.
British Gas is using Landis+Gyr (L+G) smart meters, which will link to a Trilliant home communications hub, which in turn feeds information to a L+G in-home display, though the company is also in talks to take similar display modules from third parties. Information about usage will be relayed from the communications hub back to a Trilliant head unit within British Gas headquarters via Vodafone's GPRS network, for which a managed services contract is in place.
The company has also signed a contract with German firm Elster to supply duel fuel smart meters that support both AS 330 electricity meters and BK-G4E gas meters, and is looking at options to fit monitors or sensors to boilers and thermostats, interconnected by ZigBee wireless personal area network (WPAN) technology, which will feed into home broadband routers allowing customers to remotely monitor and manage their central heating.
"Proprietary [radio] technology is not the way forward and we would like to standardise around a common approach, which for us is ZigBee," says Petter Allison, managing director of technology and innovation at British Gas. "We are seeing the beginning of a [supplier] eco-system here where we can commoditise some devices and still have them working with the smart meter industry specification."
Energy giants give users more control over their consumption
British Gas and E.ON talk about the technology behind their respective smart meter rollouts
Energy company E.ON has pledged to put a million smart meters in UK homes and businesses by 2014, rising to eight million afterwards. It currently employs 100 people in a "centre of excellence" running a controlled environment for smart meter trials.
E.ON has not yet made any firm choices of equipment or suppliers, according to head of solution development for metering John Fisher. Smart meters from both L+G and Elster are under consideration, as are smart messaging service (SMS) and GSM connections for the communications link. The company already uses a managed private mobile radio (PMR) service on some of its pay-as-you-go meters.
"The pieces we are installing are as close as we can get to the industry specification, but until that specification has been published we cannot be certain what it will be, and we risk being stranded [from an interoperability perspective] and having to knock on customers doors twice to install two sets of equipment," says Fisher. "We are looking at Zigbee, but it is a test and learning exercise. We know of some obstacles but not the extent of them - meter points will create a problem for us, but these are not unique to E.ON and are things that others in the industry are looking at."
Whereas E.ON says it looked at its earlier smart meter deployments in Sweden, Germany and Italy for inspiration in choosing a UK system, Allison says it is not possible for British Gas to copy the architecture used elsewhere because the UK has higher requirements than other countries, which forces an entirely different approach.
The fact that there is so much competition in the UK energy supply market, rather than being dominated by a single supplier, complicates matters considerably, for example, because it means that interoperable standards are absolutely essential if customers are to be able to switch suppliers easily. Allison estimates 150,000 users do this every week.
"We were not able to simply copy what we saw elsewhere, though in the beginning that is what we thought we would do," says Allison. "Other countries have closed interoperable standards where they can buy stuff off the shelf, but the UK cannot do that because of the large number of competing entities.
"Another complication is the fact that 12-15 per cent of energy customers are on pre-pay tariffs, which brings a big slug of new complexities and demands. We need to be able to switch between pre-pay and credit accounts over the air, and think about how the in-home display handles that."
British Gas also had to adapt its back-end billing systems, contracting SAP to build out a special advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) variant of its software to accommodate smart meters, allowing the energy company's OSIsoft data repository to feed directly into the application in order to create a seamless software stack from one end of the smart metering system to the other.
Energy giants give users more control over their consumption
British Gas and E.ON talk about the technology behind their respective smart meter rollouts
So much emphasis on GSM and GPRS networks for the data communications link has led to concerns that customers in areas of the UK with poor mobile coverage will not be able to take part in the smart metering scheme, one reason why E.ON is keeping its options open, including powerline communications. For its part, British Gas says usage information will be stored on the meter itself before being transmitted when a mobile signal comes back on line.
"The meters themselves can hold at least three months of data, so there is no loss of information if the signal goes down," British Gas's Allison told Computing. "We would typically only upload data from the meters once a day, usually in the small hours of the morning, though for certain types of applications - such as where the customer has an electric vehicle or heat pump - we would increase the frequency of the uploads and data refreshes."
With so much new technology about to enter UK homes and businesses on such a massive scale, the helpdesk and support task is likely to be equally as mammoth a challenge as rolling out the infrastructure in the first place. British Gas has created an entirely new division to cope with the burden, employing 2,500 people in Leeds for the task.
"We are content to have conventional meters installed by third parties. We want our own labour force for smart meters, so we created a new division," says Allison. "We will use handheld devices to help engineers perform the install, and call centre agents will be able to explain to customers how to read the smart meters."
E.ON's Fisher says his firm has 100 advisers supporting 35,000 smart meter users, "but that will not be enough by 2014 and we are looking to recruit further, and eventually smart meter support will be absorbed into normal operations".