The deployment of smart meters in Europe is planned to reach about 100 millions of units in the coming 10 years.
This past week, I was able to see the efforts provided by the entire European utility market while visiting major meter manufacturers in France. France is very unique in that its market is very regulated, with a specific public utility company, EDF, delivering electricity to the entire country. EDF benefits from its wholly-owned subsidiary ERDF, which is the distribution network operator in France. As such, ERDF operates, maintains and develops the electricity distribution network in the whole country.
ERDF plans to replace 35M electric meters between 2012 and 2017. Simply doing the math, this means about 30,000 meters will need to be replaced every day during this period… This is undoubtedly one immense challenge, not only technically, but also financially and logistically!
From the technical perspective the topology of the grid is such that power line communication (PLC) in the CENELEC band-A has been selected as the preferred method for transporting the information from the end-customer electric meter to the concentrator. And from the concentrator GPRS brings the data to the data-center. Even if spread frequency shift keying (SFSK) has been chosen as the modulation scheme for the transmission, further work is on-going to determine the possibility to use alternative solutions such as Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Moving to higher bit-rates (typically from a few Kbps to tens of Kbps) will allow shorter communication times that will be especially motivating when doing code upgrades within the meters.
Once the electric meters are installed, other meters could use them as gateways. One possible application would be to have water and gas meters talking to the electric meter through short distance RF communication. Here the quality of the transmission is critical, as water and gas meters are battery powered and need to run for 15 to 20 years on their battery typically. As most residential homes in France are built in concrete, the usage of the 868 MHz frequency band is widely spread. Wireless MBUS (WMBUS) is currently getting a significant traction, mostly due to the fact that MBUS has been the wired solution implemented for years, but also that it enables a simple star network topology that fits very well to the applications’ requirements. It is important to notice that WMBUS benefits from constant improvements from the meter manufacturers.
With regards to ERDF, the first significant field trial will happen from March to Sept. 2010, where 100,000 meters and 4,000 concentrators will be changed in 150 rural cities. It is clear that major conclusions will be drawn from this deployment in order to prepare the big wave of 2012!
Further details on the ERDF plan and schedule can be found at http://bernfa.blogs.nouvelobs.com/media/00/01/1298504411.pdf
Stay tuned more insights to come on other markets!
Emmanuel Sambuis
General Manager - Metering Business Unit
