Italy leads the way in smart metering

The move to smart metering is rapidly gathering pace. Across Europe and around the industrialised world, pilot projects and more advanced initiatives are in varying stages of progress – including of course, right here at home.

The first, largest and most advanced deployment of smart metering technology, however, is already well established in Italy. Enel – Italy’s largest electric utility – rolled out more than 27 million smart meters between 2000 and 2005. And the company is also on track to provide smart meters to all 36 million of its domestic customers by 2011.

Ente Nazionale per l'Energia eLettrica, or Enel, is the world’s third largest power utility, with a presence in 22 countries serving more than 61 million customers. Since its inception Enel has had an active interest in research and development, and its Engineering and Innovation Division employs 200 researchers in facilities throughout Italy.

The changeover to smart metering was, however, a massive undertaking even for Enel, and the company chose a number of strategic partners to assist. Capgemini, a consulting firm that operates in more than 30 countries, acted as lead partner. Capgemini is a founding member of the Smart Energy Alliance, an association of technology companies which co-operate in the development of power distribution systems and includes such partners as Intel, GE, Cisco and Oracle.

Enel’s smart meters are of the most advanced type currently in use, with integrated bidirectional communications and remote measurement and management capabilities. Behind all these technologies, the critical element is reliable and secure communications from the customer meter to the utility’s central control facility.

Among the solutions currently employed are piggybacking on existing mobile telephone networks, various types of radio transmission, and direct communication over the electric grid – the preferred option as it allows the operator to move sensitive customer data over infrastructure that it controls.

Enel chose the LonWorks platform provided by the Echelon Corporation of San Jose, California, which operates by transmitting a modulated carrier signal directly over Enel’s existing power lines.

The smart metering initiative by Enel was, somewhat unusually, not driven by regulatory requirement, but justified on a commercial basis, despite the enormous costs involved. Enel has estimated the cost of the changeover at more than €2 billion, but says it is making operational savings of as much as €500 million per year – in effect, a four-year payback. Enel has estimated that it is able to make six million fewer field visits each year while at the same time being able to respond to 98 per cent of customer requests within 24 hours. Savings have also been achieved through improved planning and load balancing and increased fraud detection.

But Enel also understood that smart metering makes more than just business sense. As part of a long-term strategy to create a fully integrated smart grid, this new technology offers a fresh approach to managing peak demand that will not only provide increased operational efficiency but will also help to address the environmental challenges we all now face.