smart grid strategies: minimizing deployment cost and...

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Smart Grid Strategies: Minimizing Deployment Cost and Time

How to drive down the cost of your smart meter deployment in the next 90 days

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WH

ITE

PAPE

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By Joe Ferrero

VP of Customer Support and Services

eMeter

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©2009 eMeter Corporation. 2

White Paper: Smart Meter Reduction Guide

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©2009 eMeter Corporation. All rights reserved. eMeter is a registered trademark of eMeter Corporation. EnergyIP is a registered trademark of eMeter Corporation. Energy Engage and SmartStart are trademarks of eMeter Corporation. All other products and brand names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Content

Summary................................................................................................................................................................................3

Why do Smart Meter solutions take so long to deploy?...........................................................................3

Caveat Emptor! Single Source networks take the Smart out of Smart Grid................................3

Lessons Learned from the Communications Industry...............................................................................4

eMeter’s SmartStart 3-Month End-to-End Solution....................................................................................5

Time-to-market is critical ............................................................................................................................................6

A foundation for growth..............................................................................................................................................7

Advantages of SmartStart............................................................................................................................................7

Summary................................................................................................................................................................................8

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© 2009 eMeter Corporation 3


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Summary

This paper provides a complete roadmap on how to thoroughly, yet quickly, authenticate your Smart Metering (also known as AMI or Advanced Metering Infrastructure) decisions, take advantage of all Smart Grid innovation and future proof your smart metering investment against costly changes introduced by Regulators, IT vendors or Meter Providers. Furthermore, it shows how you can provide a complete feedback loop to your consumers allowing them to actively manage their energy usage.

Why do Smart Meter solutions take so long to deploy?

Utilities around the world are evaluating, selecting, demonstrating and deploying smart metering technology. For many, a smart meter deployment will be the largest capital project they ever undertake. During this process, utilities face numerous challenges handling multiple smart meter technology providers, managing complex implementation requirements, providing integration flexibility and planning deployment meter installation logistics. As a result, many programs are planned to take 10 years or longer.

Over that same period, utilities will fundamentally change their relationship with their customers, offering products, services and pricing plans that are only being imagined today. In addition, the industry will continue undergoing a transformation through competition, consolidation, increased inter-dependencies and greater economies of scale. Whatever metering technology is deployed, it must be flexible. Today there are few regulatory or industry standards for Smart Grid technology. Utilities are looking to deploy cost effective solutions now that will adapt to the Smart Grid of tomorrow. Procurement decisions are difficult due to the tradeoffs between functionality, reliability, innovation and future requirements.

The Smart Grid will require utility IT infrastructures to be enhanced. Meter data collection and billing systems will undergo a makeover as smart meters are rolled out. Meter readings will increase from a typical once per month now to 30 reads per month (daily reads) to 720 reads per month (hourly reads) to almost 2900 reads per month (15 minute interval reads). The business processes to support the collecting, analyzing and processing of that much additional data is an often overlooked, yet critical component, of the move to the Smart Grid.

Caveat Emptor! Single Source networks take the Smart out of Smart Grid

Solutions offered by meter providers that offer end-to-end connectivity between a meter and the utility’s CIS system are attractive because they offer “one hand to shake” or “one tie to grab.” The solution offered is

Utilities will

fundamentally

change their

relationship with their

customers, offering

products, services and

pricing plans that are

only being imagined

today.

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typical of new technology being introduced to an existing marketplace – it offers a closed, proprietary system that can all be controlled by one vendor.

Solutions offered by consumer focused software companies are compelling in their layout and design, but lack the ability to integrate with multiple meter types or integrate to a utility’s IT infrastructure. The volume of data, along with the business processes needed to integrate the data into the customer care and billing applications is often beyond a consumer software company’s core competency.

Because of all the known variables and unknown future requirements, initial Smart Meter deployments often take calendar years rather than calendar quarters to complete. When limited scope deployment pilots are done, the effort is often thrown away when a utility moves to a large-scale project. Scalability, perhaps the single most important attribute for a successful full deployment, cannot be properly tested in a pilot deployment.

Lessons Learned from the Communications Industry

Today’s challenges in the utilities industry are broadly comparable to the communications industry over the last 15-20 years. What was once a stable and moderate growth business, the communications industry, particularly wireless communications, has radically transformed since 1990.

In 1990, mobile telephones were expensive, heavy, offered short battery life and functionality that was limited to making and receiving calls. While major communications infrastructure providers such as Motorola and Ericsson provided most cellular devices, electronic pagers still had a much larger market share than mobile phones.

Ten years later, mobile phones were smaller and more functional, but few consumers used the advanced features of messaging and wireless Internet that became available with the introduction of digital cellular networks. A range of consumer electronics manufacturers including Sony, Panasonic, and Samsung started offering phones, which contributed to the continued growth of mobile phones while traditional landline phones, started to shrink.

In today’s marketplace, consumers use their phones for communications, messaging, organization and entertainment. More importantly, online application stores are available to download new applications, ringtones and other phone accessories that neither the network providers nor the device manufacturers included with their base product. Phones have become a consumer product that attracts consumers to a network.

The single most

important attribute is

the ability to integrate

with multiple meter

types.

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The key lessons learned for utility executives are:

1. The device (i.e., phone or meter) providers of today will not be the

device providers of tomorrow

2. A continuous upgrade of networking technology allows more

applications and broader consumer adoption

3. An open platform that offers consumers many applications, along

with the ability to offer a broad choice of rate plans will be a

requirement of the future

eMeter’s SmartStart 3-Month End-to-End Solution

eMeter was founded by pioneers in electronic metering over nine years ago. The co-founders of CellNet Data Systems also co-founded eMeter in part due to their frustration with the time and effort required to deploy even a small amount of electronic meters into a utility’s infrastructure. They recognized an opportunity that would allow their customers to quickly deploy any metering technology, integrated to any back office infrastructure.

The result is eMeter’s EnergyIP™. EnergyIP quickly became the benchmark in a new category of utility software: Meter Data Management (MDM). Today, EnergyIP is the world’s leading MDM product, with the most large-scale smart meter deployments in the industry.

Additionally, EnergyIP has a perfect complement in Energy Engage™, a highly scalable web portal solution that provides consumers views regarding energy usage, cost and carbon footprint so they can make smart choices about energy consumption.

The eMeter SmartStart™ service offering is born from the same sense of opportunity to roll out Smart Meter deployments faster, while also providing utilities a final solution that will scale to large volumes of meters. SmartStart offers utilities a proven blueprint containing eMeter’s nine years of MDM experience for both business process redesign and back office technical integration. Furthermore, SmartStart also includes a pre-configured consumer web portal (Energy Engage) that enables utilities and consumers to work together to drive sustainable energy conservation and cost reduction.

It is a complete solution.

Like the mobile phone

industry, utilities must

lay an extensible

foundation to quickly

adapt to changes and

new opportunities.

The key criteria for

every Smart Grid is to

be meter agnostic,

provide enterprise

agility for quick

integration, address

ever-evolving

regulatory & IT

changes, and present

the consumer with the

ability to drive

sustainable energy

conservation and cost

reduction.

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In just three months, eMeter’s experts can deploy an end-to-end, meter-to-cash, scalable solution that contains all of the essential functionality required of a MDM:

1. Real-time integration to multiple meters

2. Comprehensive Validation, Estimating and Editing (VEE) processing

3. Time of Use (ToU) billing bucketing or framing

4. Integration to Customer Information Management Systems (CIS)

5. Consumer engagement software to present energy usage, costs and carbon footprint to

consumers

The three month deployment is done using EnergyIP – which is proven scalable to process over 20 Million meters daily, reducing the overall project risk and ensuring that there is no throw away effort involved in the initial deployment.

Time-to-market is critical

Some decisions just need to be made sooner than later. Whether it be validating meter selection or infrastructure, verifying your implementation goals or assessing flexibility of integration with your IT system, it’s critical that the right choice is made so money is not wasted down the road.

The SmartStart program is based on eMeter’s predefined and fully tested configurations which are based on industry best practices and get you the results you are looking for in as short as 12 weeks.

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eMeter’s methodology is based on many successful implementations and years of experience. eMeter has identified the bottlenecks and created a streamlined approach to make sure you get the most out of your investment.

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A foundation for growth

Following the initial deployment, eMeter’s experts can guide customers on subsequent phases, based on what EnergyIP functionality will generate the greatest financial return.

Additional three-month deployment cycles might include:

1. Smart Meter deployment planning and logistics management

2. Additional meter trials or deployments

3. Integration to Outage Management or other infrastructure

applications

4. MV-90 Replacement

5. Wholesale / Retail Energy Settlement

6. Demand Response Applications

7. Implementation of new regulatory requirements

Advantages of SmartStart

Keep your Meter Vendors Competitive No matter which step in the procurement cycle is completed, a SmartStart implementation will create competition between meter vendors, validating both the metering and network technology claims while also driving down prices. Meter vendors are compared side-by- side on accuracy and reliability.

A reliance on a meter providers’ MDM or billing front-end provides the meter provider with a proprietary lock-in that is difficult and expensive to unlock. SmartStart provides an open platform, allowing the simultaneous test of multiple meters or multiple releases of meters from the same provider.

Iterative and agile deployments allow for increased flexibility, innovation and a phased, planned approach to SMART METERING SmartStart’s three-month deployment cycles avoid the problem of continuously changing requirements and shifting technology. The phased approach allows utilities, regulators and consumers to see incremental progress on the road to the Smart Grid. As new technologies or applications become available, they can be quickly tested and implemented without disrupting the status quo.

The Smart Grid is a dynamic marketplace of meters, networking technology, applications, services and pricing plans. Flexibility is the key to growth in the marketplace. Utilities will need to adopt the speed and resourcefulness of consumer product and technology companies while continuing to offer the reliability for which they are known.

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SmartStart provides a

pre-configured

solution to validate

your meter selection,

verify implementation

goals, assess flexibility

of integration and

deliver an integrated

consumer portal in as

little as 12 weeks.

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Focus on business transformation while minimizing the impact on IT Infrastructure eMeter understands the business process transformation utilities go through during a smart meter deployment. SmartStart was developed with eMeter’s collective knowledge of best practices and a goal of accelerating time to market. The documented and pre-configured best practices allow utilities a full implementation of smart metering technologies in three months with no throw away effort.

eMeter’s pre-packaged integration to SAP and other CIS packages allows eMeter’s customers to achieve success faster by focusing on business process transformation rather than technical integration details.

Summary

eMeter’s SmartStart service offering allows utilities to quickly realize smart grid success while simultaneously building a future-proof platform.

SmartStart enables:

Procurement executives to implement a multi-source selection for a key infrastructure project

Marketing executives to manage dynamic innovation on a platform from which they can deploy Smart Grid applications and avoid a proprietary system that offers innovation only on an incremental schedule

Metering executives to keep a competitive environment to drive down costs from current suppliers and keep options open for future innovation

Technology executives to implement proven technology that is massively scalable and pre-configured to integrate into their existing IT infrastructure

An introduction to SmartStart is available by sending an email to [email protected] or by calling +1.650.227.7770 and asking for a SmartStart representative.

System independence

and an open

architecture coupled

with extensive

industry experience

keeps meter vendors

competitive, and

equipped with the

required flexibility to

enable scaling, future

functionality and

adaptation to

regulatory and

technological change.

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