What is a smart meter?
Energy metering hardware and software is becoming increasingly sophisticated for multiple reasons including: to enable accurate customer billing; to inform building energy management onsite; and to improve the energy efficiency of the electricity network (aka Smart Grid).
A smart meter is a device that involves a variety of different technology, such as real-time or near real-time reads, power outage notification, and power quality monitoring. A smart meter is likely to form part of an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), which is a system that measures, collects and analyses energy usage using various communication media. Information from the smart meter will be sent to a data management centre where it will be automatically analysed and communicated to customers, suppliers, utility companies and service providers.
Smart meters are relatively new technology both in terms of hardware and software. These meters are only just starting to be deployed because of the opportunity they offer for improved energy efficiency (at the site and network level) and carbon emission reductions. The predominant existing meter technology used by business and industrial has been automatic meeter reading (AMR), which collects data from energy metering devices and transfers that data to a central database for billing and/or analyse. AMR is not as sophisticated as the AMI technology, which enables two-way communications with the meter.
AMR and AMI technology will be most appropriate for businsses with the following characteristics:
• Energy comprises a large business cost
• Multiple sites, or a large site with many sub-meters which take a lot of time to read
• Unattended sites
• Where you need information on energy use without delay
• Where the time of day at which energy is used is important – e.g. for time of day billing
• Your business is affected by the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, or is likely to be in the future. If so, installing AMR systems voluntarily can count towards your early action metric up to the 31st March 2011. Read more about the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme.
Most smart meters are for electricity, but these meters are being designed for gas and water.
It is antipicated SMEasure will eventually be able to integrate energy data captured with smart meter technology. However, at this stage of development in the software, we are scoping out the trends and devices emerging, because it is not clear which devices will be the market leaders. Also, these devices are not cheap so for our target audience of small medium sized businesses our focus is on providing high quality building energy analysis at no to low cost.