04.03.2024
Source: Energy & Management Powernews
Smart metering is making its way into operations. Service providers such as Voltaris have now left the pilot phase behind them with a number of customers.
The basic metering point operators - usually the local operators of the low-voltage grids - will have to manage the smart meter rollout in the coming years. This role has been assigned to them by the Metering Point Operation Act. A look at the Act on the Restart of the Digitization of the Energy Transition, which was passed last year, shows what companies will have to do. This made it clear that metering point operators must have completed at least 20 percent of all mandatory installations in their grid area by the end of 2025.
The mandatory rollout applies to electricity consumers who consume between 6,000 and 100,000 kWh per year and to systems that must be controllable in accordance with the provisions of Section 14a of the Energy Industry Act (EnWG). It also extends to generators with an installed capacity of 7 to 100 kW.
With the increasing electrification of the heating and transport sectors, more and more consumers will fall into the mandatory rollout category and the enormous increase in photovoltaic systems will also significantly increase the number of mandatory smart meters "in the field". Volker Schirra assumes that between 30 and 40 percent of all metering points will be in the mandatory rollout category by 2030, as he recently said in an interview with journalists. According to the managing director of metering service provider Voltaris, the proportion is currently between 20 and 30 percent, depending on the network area.
In view of these ratios, Schirra sees increasing pressure on the metering point operators with basic responsibility. They would be well advised to start working through the mandatory installation cases as early as possible, because in addition to the burden of the growing volume, he believes that installation capacities could slow down the rollout efforts as a scarce commodity. It is advisable to focus not only on the 20 percent by the end of the year, but also on the legally prescribed target of 50 percent by the end of 2028 and 95 percent by the end of 2030. And finally, there is also the installation obligation for customers with more than 100,000 kWh annual consumption and producers with more than 100 kW installed capacity who have been load metered to date. A gradual target from 2028 to 2030 to 2032 is pressing here.
Volume structure difficult to estimate
As part of a user community, Voltaris has been supporting municipal utilities on the path to the smart meter rollout since 2016. The metering service provider's initiative, which now includes more than 40 municipal companies with around 1.4 million metering points, aims to facilitate an exchange of experiences between the companies, classify and discuss current technical and regulatory developments with external specialists and, above all, prepare concrete steps for connecting IT systems and adapting processes in workshops.
"70 percent of the members of our user community are connected," says Marcus Hörhammer. The Head of Product Development and Sales at Voltaris adds with obvious satisfaction that "are connected" ultimately means "are in productive operation with smart metering systems". It is primarily small and medium-sized metering point operators who are planning and implementing the smart meter rollout together with Voltaris. Municipal utilities with 20,000 or 30,000 metering points are among them, which have already brought a three-digit number of smart metering systems into the field, as Hörhammer reports.
Nationwide, the metering point operators with basic responsibility - whether in a user community or not - are currently trying to estimate the number of mandatory installations over the next few years. The network operator of a town the size of Villingen-Schwenningen may well be faced with 5,000 mandatory installations per year. Gregor Gülpen, Managing Director of Stadtwerke in the municipality of 88,000 inhabitants in southern Baden, estimates this figure for the period up to 2030, as he explained in an interview with E&M at the end of last year. "As of now", he added explicitly at the time.
How many metering points actually need to be equipped with a smart metering system remains to be seen. If the number of mandatory installations were to increase as a result of the electrification of the heating and transport sectors, Gülpen would not be surprised.
Discussions about the rollout often assume a 1:1 relationship at a metering point: An electronic meter is connected to a smart meter gateway so that together they form a smart metering system, as defined in the Metering Point Operation Act. However, the technology is now so advanced that several meters can also be connected to a gateway, for example in an apartment building. "This means you don't have to install a meter with its own gateway for each apartment," emphasizes Voltaris manager Hörhammer.
Now it's time for gateway administrators like Voltaris to implement such 1:n relationships on the market, especially with wireless technology via wM-Bus (Wireless Meter-Bus). Cost savings for installation and materials as well as the possibility of realizing installation cases that would not have been possible with a cable connection are the main advantages of this solution. However, the limited range of radio-based data transmission is still an obstacle.
Nevertheless, the technology was celebrated as a "milestone" for the smart meter rollout by manufacturers and metering point operators when it was introduced last year. Voltaris has also brought the first wireless solutions with wM-Bus into the field. "Not only in the laboratory, but also in customer installations," as Hörhammer emphasizes. It goes without saying that the technology is tried and tested and meets the requirements of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB).
Multi-sector solutions are gaining in importance
The additional connection of gas, water and heat meters is another topic that Hörhammer and his colleagues will be addressing this year. At the moment, smart metering is still very much electricity-based. "But it won't stay that way. That is why we are already creating the systemic foundations," says Hörhammer, referring to field tests with a module that reads gas measurement data and transfers it to the Voltaris backend system so that it can be further distributed and fed into the energy management processes.
Even those who do not deal with the integration of IT systems and complex interface problems on a daily basis can imagine that it is a challenge to ensure and automate the data flows from the collection of measurement data to billing on an end-to-end basis. The gateway administration system controls the gateway and the so-called passive external market participant receives the measured values and decodes them.
And then the data still has to get into the ERP system of the suppliers and grid operators. Switching and control in the low voltage further increases the complexity of the overall system. This is where the so-called active external market participant comes into play, which establishes a bidirectional connection. Only this system can ultimately open a secure channel and access the control box at the CLS interface (CLS stands for Controllable Local Systems) of the smart meter gateway so that switching commands can reach downstream devices and systems.
Now that the technical and regulatory requirements for switching and control are in place and the practical relevance is becoming more tangible, it is becoming increasingly clear how important protection against cyberattacks is and the fundamental importance of the high security standards of smart meter gateways and the associated processes. According to Hörhammer, many market participants have therefore reconciled themselves in recent months to the security requirements that were previously often criticized as being too high.
Author: Fritz Wilhelm
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