Smart Metering - (1). Introduction: What's it all about ?
We've all seen the latest advertising campaigns for the smart metering roll-out in the UK: you know the one, it looks like it's designed by someone with a limited quality GCSE in media studies and targetted at those with an early teenage sense of humour, not exactly a good representation of the average responsible energy account holder, but then again it does shine a light on how the consumer is generally perceived by the energy supply sector. So, setting cartoon characters along with government and industry hype aside, what's it all about. This is intended to be the first in a series of articles looking into smart-metering, delving into the advantages, the benefits and whether the project can meet expectations.
What are Smart Meters
Smart Meters are domestic electricity and gas meters which have embedded communications technologies which enable the automatic transmission of digital consumption readings to the energy suppliers at a pre-determined interval. Smart-metering technologies also provide the infrastructure through which suppliers will gain the ability to remotely control various high power loads in the consumer's home or even completely disconnect a property when deemed necessary. The main project justification is based on assisting consumers to better understand and manage their own energy consumption and remove the need for regular visits to manually read meters, thereby allowing more accurate billing and the phasing out of estimated energy bills.
History : What is the Project's Primary Driver
The European Council and European Parliament, as part of the Third Package of Energy Liberalisation Measures (adopted 13/07/2009) obliged EU Member States to conduct economic assessments on the implementation of smart-metering technologies designed to actively improve consumer understanding of their energy consumption patterns and thereby reduce demand. Member States showing an overall positive economic assessment for electricity smart-metering were to target the provision of smart-meters to 80% of consumers assessed positively by 2020, whilst a positive assessment for gas required the preparation of a smart-metering timetable.
Possibly as a result of slow progress over the following three years, and to ensure EU countries were able to remain in compliance with smart-metering project milestones, a required implementation date of 05/06/2014 was set for the EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) of 2012 which introduced additional requirements to address both demand and supply side energy efficiency, including smart meters, with a view to ensure that the EU meets a primary energy consumption reduction target of 20% by 2020.
Timescales
An initial program for smart-metering has been running within the UK for a few years, however, from 2016 onwards energy companies have been progressively ramping up the rate of installation in order to meet the 2020 target. Government and industry reports anticipate that a total of approximately 53 million smart-meters will be required within the scope of the project, with the Government having committed to install in every home and a high proportion of small & medium sized non-domestic properties in the UK by 2020.
Project Cost
The economic assessment conducted by the UK Government (DECC's Impact Assessment of 27/07/2010) estimated the cost of the smart metering project as £10.05billion, increasing to £10.85billion when reassessed in 2012, rising again to £12.115billion in January 2013, before being reduced to £10.927billion after reassessing installation numbers and costs in October 2013, with many sources still seeming to use this figure. Current consensus seems to revolve around a project cost of at least £12billion at 2012 costs without allowing for unplanned & uncosted duplications and project over-runs, which are likely to have a cost impact of around £1.5billion. Allowing for inflation, the total cost therefore looks more like £15billion at 2017 economics, or approximately £500 per property..
Customer Obligation
Although there is a Government commitment to install smart-meters in every home in the country by 2020, there is no legal obligation on consumers to have one. Energy suppliers are simply required to make all reasonable efforts to offer smart-meters to their customer base and where the offer is accepted, to install in those properties by 2020.
Technical
In basic terms, smart-meters work the same way as existing traditional meters in that they provide a measure of energy consumed over a period of time. When installing smart-meters, customers should be offered an In-House-Display (IHD), a remote screen which provides a near real-time display of the current rate of power consumption and the energy which has been consumed over a period of time. IHDs should have functionality to select display modes to suit individual customer preferences, for example power measured in kW can be displayed as a cost per hour and energy consumed in kWh or by value. The major justification of the project is predicated on consumers reacting to information provided by the IHD units and, through employing the IHD on an interactive and proactive basis, adjusting their own energy consumption profiles in order to save money.
Moving beyond basic capabilities of a meter with a remote monitor, smart-meters effectively have a number of major enhancements to be aware of.
(1). To communicate directly with energy suppliers
Communication is via a network based on mobile phone technologies and operated by a Data Communications Company (DCC) on behalf of the energy supply industry. Effectively the DCC enables customer nodes and supplier nodes to communicate, thus simplifying the supplier change process. Before the establishment of the DCC in 2016 (yes, it was late!), there could be no customer expectation that smart-meters installed by one supplier could be operated as a smart-meter with all other potential suppliers. The provision of communication enabled meters allows the energy industry to replace the costly and customer-disruptive practice of reading meters with a less frequent safety inspection, to be proactive on localised fault conditions, to disconnect site supply if deemed necessary, to update and vary prices and tariffs at short notice, to utilise localised Internet-of-Things technologies on a remote basis and to update IHD tariff data to provide real costs to consumers.
(2). To communicate with other devices
Smart Meters not only have the ability to communicate with each other and the IHD, but also with other devices (Internet of Things) via a ZigBee protocol compliant Home Area Network (HAN) within the customers own home. Although there has been little information forthcoming from either industry or government sources, there is a project expectation to reduce the overall peak time demand for power through leveraging benefits derived from customers investing in smart-appliances and consenting to have some higher power appliances switched off by their energy supplier for a pre-agreed time when deemed necessary.
(3). Directional current metering (Import / Export)
Smart Meters will have the facility to separately meter on a bi-directional basis (import/export). This is a requirement for seamless integration of domestic microgeneration technologies and is effectively the reason behind the introduction of deemed export percentages within the Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) scheme in lieu of project and cost duplication which the provision of dedicated dumb export meters would create.
(4). Multiple Registers & HHM
Smart Meters have multiple registers to record various usage history in time-slices to a resolution of 30 minutes. This is generally referred to as Time-of-Use (ToU) metering or Half-Hourly-Metering (HHM) and will provide the energy supply industry to vary the cost of energy throughout the day utilising up to four different tariffs. Smart-Meter specifications indicate that tariff variations can logically be based on block timing similar to the provision of the current 'E7/E10' over night 'cheap rate' supply, or unplanned temporary ToU punitive tariffs to encourage consumers to reduce consumption when the aggregated national demand is close to maximum supply capacity.
(5). Multi-Functionality
Smart Meters will have the functionality to operate either as credit or prepayment meters with mode switching conducted remotely. This enables consumers to easily switch between tariffs involving either form of payment and conversely, the energy provider to switch customers to prepayment if an agreed or mandated credit threshold is surpassed.
Standards, Compliance & Non-Compliance
Officially, smart meter provision should be to a functional compliance standard described at SMETS2 (Smart MEter Technical Specifications) which, according to necessary project timescales, should have superseded the previous SMETS1 standard well before 2015 in order to facilitate the ramping-up of installations planned for 2016. Some suppliers installed pre-SMETS smart meters (reclassified as 'advanced meters') which do not meet smart meter specifications and need to be replaced in due course, however, the vast majority of installations to date conform to the SMETS1 standard and therefore do not provide all functions which have been identified as necessary to incorporate into a smart-grid.
Resulting from delays in developing a fully functional standard for SMETS2 compliance and a fully functional DCC without the necessary relaxing of installation targets, energy suppliers were forced to roll-out SMETS1 compliant units and create their own independent data communications solutions. If a customer changes energy supplier, a SMETS1 meter may not continue to work as a smart meter due to incompatibilities between energy supplier communication infrastructures and settings. In these cases the meter will simply act as a traditional 'dumb' meter and need to be read manually. To avoid delaying the project, the UK Government have allowed continued roll-out of SMETS1 compliant meters which can be included in their installation targets through to 28/10/2017, 12 months after the DCC system went live. At considerable additional cost & effort, the DCC was tasked to investigate reprogramming, bridging or interfacing solutions in order to adopt the communication responsibilities provided by individual suppliers. Although non-compliant meters have continued to be rolled-out simply to meet targets, in order to avoid considerable project cost-overrun through effort and capital equipment provision duplication, there is no requirement to replace these early installation systems with fully functional systems. An exception has also been made to count and include 'advanced meters' installed in small non-domestic properties before 06/04/2016 within the smart metering project although there may be no long-term ability to take advantage of whatever smart or advanced features they may employ.
Project Progress
According to the latest report a total of around 6.30 million electricity & gas smart meters had been installed in domestic properties up to the end of Q1/2017, almost all of which are not SMETS2 compliant and therefore will need further investment beyond the planned scope of the project. This represents approximately 12% of the project's target of 53 million installations by 2020. Of the total, approximately 6.01 million had been installed by larger suppliers (250,000+customers) having a requirement to submit more detailed statistics than small suppliers. Approximately 250,000 (4.2%) of smart-meters installed are unable to operate in 'smart' mode and are operated as basic 'dumb' meters.
In addition to meters installed in domestic properties, approximately 800,000 advanced and smart meters had been installed in non-domestic properties as part of the smart-metering roll-out up to the end of Q2/2017, the vast majority being non-SMETS/non-DCC compliant 'advanced' meters
The chart below provides a breakdown of smart & advanced meter installations in non-domestic properties.
Installation Consensus
General consensus amongst many technical groups and sources at the moment seems to be for those definitely interested in having smart-meters installed to allow the SMET2 standards and early supply batches to settle and allow installers to run-down delivery commitments and stocks of SMETS1 units which are not fully compliant.
Figures: BEIS - Crown Copyright ©2017
