The fast-pace of development in the GCC has created a growing market for electric meters. The challenge facing the industry is to ensure that they are fast, reliable, easy-to-use and inexpensive to read.
Utilities have long sought to find ways to reduce costs associated with meter data collection.
In the early 1980s, hand-held meter reading devices were deployed to replace manual recording of meter information. These reduced the recording time and reduced transcription errors.
During the 1990s, wireless transceivers were being fitted into meters and fixed wireless infrastructure was built to allow metering data to be brought directly into billing systems thus eliminating the need for manual or drive-by meter scanning.
“The fact is that these days in the UAE they are building cities upwards,” says Ali Mouslmani, regional director of metering systems manufacturer Elster Electricity. “This means that a building has an average of at least 30 floors and maybe five meter units on each floor.
That is 150 units to measure in one building. Multiply this by the number of buildings being built in the whole region and you can imagine the number of meters that are needed.”
It will be increasingly difficult and time-consuming for a meter reader to visit each floor of a 30-floor building in order to carry out the readings. On top of this mechanical meters are subject to tampering, lose 5-8% of their accuracy after ten years, and do not allow for effective load management, whereby utility companies can encourage or discourage usage at peak and off-peak times.
“Government utilities are looking to track consumption and customer profiles closely in an effective, easily manageable process.”
Fortunately, life for utility providers is becoming easier thanks to the emergence of automatic meter reading (AMR) systems. These allow all meters to be read remotely, through a number of different methods, and transfer the data to a central database for billing. This greatly improves accuracy, and means a customer can be billed based on actual consumption rather than mere estimates, as was the case before.
Electronic meters are used instead of mechanical ones, and are fitted with a communication module. Readings may be taken of each meter using a hand-held terminal with an antenna. An operator can walk or drive around the area while the device collects the information on radio frequency, with each meter having its own ID. Once all the readings are in, the operator can dock the terminal at a central computer and load the information on to it.
Alternatively, the meters might be linked to each other in a network, with or without wires. This mesh network sees the meters linked internally and acting as repeaters, which keep passing the data on until it reaches the central computer. The central computer can be linked to the meters. The only requiremnet is that it is located in the same building.
In other cases a concentrator is used to collect the data, which is then transmitted to the central computer via a fibre-optic network, or via GSM or GPRS. In this case, distance is not an issue. The utility can be in full control of its meters via GSM and not a single person is required to be in the field to collect the information – which can result in significant cost savings.
In the case of electric meters, data can be transmitted over power lines back to a computer. This is known as a power line carrier (PLC) system. Meters are connected to the power distribution lines within a building and can be read by a remote meter unit (RMU), which sends the information over low-voltage power lines to a gateway, an industrial PC, in a medium to low-voltage substation.
This also provides cost savings, as it means that regular electricity cables are used to transfer the data, and as such no additional infrastructure or costs are required.
The meters transfer data to a concentrator located at the transformer substation. Then, telephone lines, PSTN (public switched telephone network), GSM or wireless media can be used to send the data from the concentrator to the control station.
But being able to read meters remotely is increasingly crucial to utilities. “At the end of the day, the meter is the cash register of the utility,” says Mouslmani. “Certainly, the quicker process is good news for utilities. The sooner they can make the readings and get the information, the sooner they can start invoicing and collecting payment.”
Saudi Arabia is increasingly seen as a growing and potentially lucrative market for meter reading, not least because the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) recently unveiled plans to introduce pay-as-you-go meters in the country, with a view to enabling customers to manage their consumption more efficiently.
Â
Â
SEC has spent several years studying the concept of prepayment, and visiting those countries which have already installed pay-as-you-go systems to evaluate the technologies available and the communication between the utility and its customers.
Customers will be given the new meters free of charge, and will be able to purchase electric smart cards in many shops, as is presently the case for those buying phone cards.
“The challenge in Saudi Arabia is that they are on 60Hz rather than 50Hz so we and the other suppliers need to design a special model for Saudi Arabia for electricity meters,” says Jarmo J Heikkinen general manager at Kamstrup Middle East.
Open systems that don’t have a vendor lock-in are set to become increasingly commonplace in the region, says Pieter van Dalen, the founder of Netherlands-based Windmill solution. Van Dalen says that demand for its system is growing in the GCC. “We get sporadic enquiries and we are interested in serving these markets, although we have basically just focused on the German and Benelux markets up to now.”
The Windmill AMR solution is based upon the Windmill AnyBridge Platform following open communication standards (TCP/IP). This offers two-way communication, through amongst others PSTN, GSM/GPRS, Ethernet (cable/ADSL) and Zigbee. The communication engine is provided with a data log function, meter cogs will not be lost in case of a broken communication connection to avoid any unnecessary bill deviation.
The communication engine can be integrated within common used e-meters, and is provided with a switch to remotely interrupt the electricity supply. The built-in processor enables intelligent behaviour. For example, irregular energy usage can be noticed on local level. After alerts sent to the utility company the power supply can be shut down remotely, which means that it can also be used for prepayment applications.
The communication engine also acts as a gateway for other utility meters, which can then be connected with MBUS, Wireless MBUS, or Zigbee. Other applications such as local heating management can also take advantage of the connectability of the Windmill engine.
“We are totally based on internet complaint communication and we don’t have any vendor lock-in so we can work with any kind of meters, Kamstrup or whatever, that’s all fine by us, as it’s a completely open system. Many meter suppliers do have proprietary protocols but we don’t,” says van Dalen.
Communication is based on sending messages from and to the utility meters through the communication engine. Any meter can be managed and adapted to changing circumstances remotely. It only takes commercially available standard software to handle the message on the server and bring them up for further processing in the central computer.
