Austria’s easternmost province Burgenland is known for its beautiful vineyards, its spas and castles. And it is one of the forerunners when it comes to digitizing the grid. According to Austrian regulations, 95% of households need to be equipped with a smart meter by 2022. As one of the country’s first distribution system operators, Netz Burgenland committed themselves to a full-scale G3 PLC smart metering solution rollout.
The long-awaited go-ahead for the smart meter rollout in Germany has officially been given with the recent “market declaration”. There is broad acknowledgement of the benefits and importance of smart metering in the urgently needed digitization of our energy supply. Yet the path to realizing widespread grid upgrades, to include intelligent endpoints for digital business models and future markets such as submetering, is by no means predetermined or free from obstacles. The rollout will be a significant feat in financial, technical and personnel terms, particularly for small and midsize municipal utilities.
The data collected from smart metering are opening up a whole new world of opportunities for utilities. Of course, you need the data for billing, but a lot more is possible today – and even more so in the future. With the E360 we have built an intelligent endpoint with enhanced communication and measurement capabilities. And as part of our end-to-end solution Gridstream® Connect, it accompanies our customers on their way towards more data-driven use cases.
Increasing amounts of data, interconnected utility infrastructures, regulation and a general awareness of security and privacy issues raise the pressure also on smart metering security. E360 is our response to the most stringent security requirements.
Landis+Gyr’s new ULTRAHEAT®T450 ultrasonic heat and cooling meter enables homes and buildings to be energy efficient and optimizes energy usage, even in the most demanding environments.
The energy system is experiencing systemic change. Generation is becoming decentralized and decarbonized with increased amounts of volatile renewable energy in the mix. Loads are becoming more flexible and grid operations more digitalized. To adapt and transform, Distribution System Operators (DSOs) require new capabilities to maintain and improve resiliency, flexibility, transparency and security. New solutions that help meeting these challenges are available and the key to unlock them lies in the intelligence at the edge of smart metering infrastructures.
