Housing in Southern Africa June 2015

Energy Efficiency, Green Building & IBTs

Smart metering platforms Municipalities and Eskom are owed tens of billions of rand by consumers. It is a precarious financial situation that threatens the viability of our power distribution system and hinders the future growth of the utility and the economy.

also signals the end of the fraudulent practice of ‘ghost vending’: generat- ing prepaid electricity tokens by understanding andmanipulating the algorithms used to create the tokens. But perhaps most crucially, smart metering allows the utility and mu- nicipalities to start influencing con- sumer behaviour through ‘time of day’ price incentives. By better understanding their usage patterns, and seeing which applications in their homes are the worst electricity hogs, consumers can start making little changes in the way they use power. Multiplied millions of times over, by every household and office in the country, these little changes will lead to a big difference. “Smart metering encompasses a range of features from full auditable readings, stored and backed up on central servers to secure prepaid token generation from an integrated vending systems,” says Vergunst. ■

A ccording to Martin Vergunst, Business Solutions Executive at T-Systems South Africa, the net effect for consumers across the countrywill be homes andbusinesses that are plunged into further cycles of rolling blackouts – particularly during the winter months when demand surges. Traditional ways of distributing and billing for electricity, on both prepaid and post-paid systems, have inherent problems. The biggest of these include inaccurate billing data, meter bridging and tampering, ghost vending, unmetered connections, and illegal connections. But Vergunst says that alleviating this problem does not necessarily mean that our meters need to be ripped out and

replaced. The solution is to move towards a smart metering service platform, combined with retrofitted communicationmodules on the end- point meters. This transforms the humble elec- tricity meter into an intelligent smart meter – enabling two-way commu- nication for capturing and sending meter data to a central store. With this, the utility receives richer data about usage patterns, providing in- sights and tools that are so essential to ensuring a stable grid. By generating real-time usage data, smart metering drastically improves the accuracy of billing, pinpoints any faults in the network, and identifies where tampering or other illegal activity is taking place. It