23 / 36
Energy Efficiency, Green Building & IBTs
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
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.
■
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.