Project dates: 01. Feb 2019 - 31. Jan 2021
Objective
The attention on the smart grids and smart grid technologies has grown significantly over the last few years as they represent key enablers towards a low carbon energy scenario. The smart grid promises to drastically change the way power is produced, exchanged and traded. In 2017, almost 40% of the 281M electricity customers in Europe had a smart meter, a share that is set to increase to 70% over the coming years. As a consequence, annual shipments of smart electricity meters will reach a peak of around 28M units per year in 2019/2020. To date, Member States have committed to rolling out close to 200M smart meters for electricity by 2020 at a total potential investment of €45B. A smart meter system employs several control devices, various sensors to identify parameters, software and communication protocols to transfer the data and command signals. Furthermore, each business case is unique, varying according to the regulatory system, business objectives and design of the existing grid. Therefore, the design, deployment and maintenance of the smart meter system involve many challenges. Integration of devices for modulation, demodulation and additional memory for storing the data logs could take months, hence increasing the overall deployment costs. Whereas, operation of a smart meter system involves a huge quantity of data transfer between a smart meter and the server located. The traditional system integration approach is inefficient and slows downs utilities’ digital transformation, due to: expensive and long deployment, poor flexibility and expensive scale up. Metercloud is a cloud based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) for data management and operations of smart meters, smart cities and IIoT. Metercloud enables utility companies to optimise smart grid operations, capitalise on dark data, and become a platform operator for smart city infrastructure.Metercloud makes the integration, update and scale-up simple, smooth and fast.