Smart Meter: fast forwarding our energy future

The roll out of the first-generation of smart meters developed by Enel in the early 2000s was one of the largest infrastructure innovations in Italy, as it became the first country in the world to have fully digital power grid. With its innovative features, the digital meter has brought simplicity and transparency, optimizing the contractual relationship of the customer with its electricity distributor and becoming the most "intelligent" device on the low-voltage grid. This innovative product was the first step towards a new generation of electric grids in which consumers and producers can benefit from advanced services focused on data accuracy, efficiency, and environmental protection.

Despite this great innovation, the evolution towards increasingly intelligent networks ("smart grids") and the new needs arising in the market have required Enel to go further and introduce additional features to benefit all market players: customers, prosumers, energy distributors, market operators, EV charging network operators, aggregators and the environment as well.

Based on the last 20 years’ experience and considering market and technological developments, the latest generation of Enel smart meters (“Open Meter Technology”) was developed few years ago allowing a real jump in the future. “Open Meter Technology” is a solution designed by Enel Global Infrastructure and Networks and implemented with leading edge technologies that enables future-proof abilities and functionalities that go beyond the simple concept of metering.

Grid edge digitalization benefits customers and utilities

The new generation of Enel smart meters introduces technological innovations to ensure high connectivity levels and completely new features creating a real breakthrough for the industry. Thanks to advanced measuring technologies and computational power, more and more granular energy data is now available to the customer and to the DSO, providing opportunities to better understand consumption habits and interact with other energy stakeholders. The daily acquisition of load profiles is enhanced making it possible to convey market offers with dynamic pricing and time of use tariffs that perfectly match the needs and behaviors of the electricity end users. By exploiting all the data that the new meter can manage and provide to the energy system, market operators (e.g. retailers) will be able to offer many value-added services in terms of both user profiling and commercial offers. Energy producers can also have a greater awareness of the efficiency of operation of their renewable plant enhancing a smarter integration of micro-generation in the grid. 

“Open Meter” allows an advanced management of the technical parameters of the digital grid edge as well, acting as a real advanced sensor, allowing a pervasive monitoring of each individual installation point. This allows the Meter Operator to have detailed information for in-depth monitoring of the state of operation of the grid and to receive notifications in real time, thanks to a dedicated wireless channel (RF 169 MHz), in the case of events of particular interest such as power outages, for example. The advantage is to have two devices in one: an intelligent meter for commercial purposes and a network sensor for the real-time monitoring of the grid.

This new generation of sensors spread all over the distribution network, will allow Enel to collect, in Italy alone, more than 7.000 billions data every year. This information can then be used in order to optimize network operations (by predictive maintenance, load balancing and revenue protection) and improve quality of service and efficiency of operations.

Thanks to the progressive digitalization of the entire electricity distribution infrastructure, starting from the grid edge with Smart meters and innovations like the QEd Quantum Edge Device ? that allow the aggregation of large volumes of information, we are harnessing the power of big data and artificial intelligence for network automation, innovating in fields such as self-healing grids and predictive maintenance.  

The newest generation of smart meters has also been designed with a special consideration to the environment and circular economy. These new devices can indeed be fully manufactured using recycled plastic materials coming from the first-generation smart meters, ensuring a circular approach. This represents an additional Enel’s step forward towards a more sustainable future. 

A customer-centric energy future

But perhaps the most meaningful innovation of the second-generation smart meters is that they take customer empowerment to the next level thanks to advanced communication capabilities with the customers’ houses in near real-time. A dedicated communications channel in the meter, also known in Italy as "Chain 2", allows the development and diffusion of commercial solutions dedicated to energy management services and home automation. A wide variety of information can be made available through this channel - not available previously on the first-generation meters – allowing customers to gain more awareness and understanding of their consumption. This feature will be a strong enabler for the smart energy customers that will take an active role in the energy market. The data and notifications sent by the smart meters to the customer premises can be shared, if the customer wishes to do so, with third-parties to develop tailored offers and new services like load management, demand-response and energy efficiency support integrated, for instance, with their domotic system. In terms of use cases, this feature can be exploited, for example, for the modulation of the available power used to recharge our electric vehicle based on the consumption measured for the home appliances (and considering the maximum contractual power) or start the washing machine when the meter notifies the activation of the off-peak tariff. 

Another benefit of the “Chain 2” is based on the use of power-line technology (PLC), a solution that allows to transmit data on the same cables that brings energy to the customer premises thus avoiding any need to modify the home installation for receiving consumption data. Thanks to this, smart meters can also communicate with the so-called smart “In-Home-Devices" connected to the customer’s electrical installation, allowing the acquisition of different energy data parameters in near real-time conditions. Any electronic device manufacturer can easily built-in data exchange capabilities, thus opening a new market in the electronic world and allowing end-users to develop their own smart-home ecosystem.

 From Smart Meters to Smart Grids.

The new generations of smart meter have been designed to be true network sensors, able to collect detailed information in case of relevant network events (i.e. voltage interruption, voltage restoration, fault conditions etc), reducing the time of intervention on outages and ensuring an efficient network operation.

Smart meters are indeed the initial step of the extraordinary grid digitalization process of power grids that will revolutionize the way customers use electricity and take control over their consumption behaviors. A smart grid in which customer smart metering systems are more and more interconnected with distribution grid devices, allowing remote control and network automation enhancement.

At Enel, we already installed more than 44 million smart meters globally, in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Peru, Romania and Spain, and we aim to keep on serving more and more customers around the world with this digital measurement technology. In Italy alone, in our roadmap to replace 32 million first-generation smart meters with new ones, we recently achieved the 20 million second-generation smart meters replacement. In Romania, for example, the digitalization plan put in place by our distribution companies has already exceeded the threshold of 1 million smart meters installed, by far the largest digitalization experience in the country. All this while we are also deploying different smart meter projects in Latin America, such as a 300 thousand pilot projects in Sao Paulo carried out with the Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency (ANEEL).

Elsewhere in the world, other DSOs are investing in smart meter roll out programs to reap the benefits of digital power grids. This integration and the evolution of grid management algorithms as well as grid-edge computational power will help increase infrastructure resilience, and ensure operational efficiency in all conditions, providing a high quality level of service to electricity end-users.

That’s why smart meters can fast forward our energy future and help in building more resilient, participatory and sustainable grids.