7 Lessons Learned From a Smart Metering, Smart Cities Initiative
Advance partnered with the City of Ekurhuleni (CoE) in South Africa to deploy a ‘Smart City’ project. We thought it would be interesting to share some of the lessons we learned in this project, and how they may pertain to your smart city initiatives. CoE has population of over 3.2 million people. The specific ‘Smart City’ use case was smart, pre-paid electricity metering:
1. Revenue Protection: From a city’s perspective, revenue protection is key. CoE found that revenue loss for first generation electricity meters (standalone, postpaid) amounts to up to 80%, and for second generation electricity meters (standalone, prepaid) amounts to up to 40%. This situation not only places pressure of a city’s financial resources, it restricts its ability to provide the services their constituents expect.
2. Smart Metering is First: More often than not, smart metering is the first smart city initiative undertaken by cities. Therefore, when planning and deciding on a technology to support smart metering, the city has to carefully consider what their smart city technology standards should be. All the lessons learned mentioned in this blog will have bearing on it.
3. Smart Metering and IoT: Smart metering is ultimately just another IoT use case, albeit a complex one. This means that the typical pitfalls encountered in IoT deployments are just as relevant to smart metering as to any other IoT use case.
4. Compliance: Apart from the large number of regulatory requirements such as gazette tariffs, free basic electricity for marginalized communities, and public sector accounting rules, accountability to constituents is the cornerstone to the social contract between city and constituents — no payment transaction may ever be ‘lost’, correct tariffs must be applied, and consumption must be accurately measured.
5. Constituent Satisfaction: Cities are, and should continually, improve the constituent experience. For example, the fact that a constituent can procure prepaid electricity anywhere and then for the system to load the prepayment transaction automatically onto their meter, and being able to track electricity consumption and cost over time, proved to be a major benefit to CoE constituents.
6. Interoperability: Most cities’ procurement processes are transparent and open for public tender. This often has the impact that over time different vendor meters are acquired and installed. This creates a major headache for cities — how does a city standardize on a single solution stack? Each vendor’s software needs to be installed with their meters, creating vendor specific ‘silos’ that are difficult to integrate on back-end systems, undermining the ‘standardization’ objective. What is needed is a solution where disparate technologies from different vendors can co-exist in a ‘plug-and-play’ type of model.
7. Retrofit: A related issue is that every city has a legacy of technology acquired over time. This technology is operational and represents past investments that could be substantial. However, especially older technology is not necessarily ‘smart’. Unless a vendor can offer a solution where older meters are retrofitted with technology that makes those meters ‘smart’, the city is faced with very expensive technology replacement projects that poses the risk of smart meter projects never getting off the ground simply because they are too expensive.
8. Re-usability: All the above issues grow exponentially when other ‘smart’ initiatives are undertaken. The fact is that ultimately a smart city uses myriad technologies that all have to work as one. Whatever technology is deployed, it has to take this heterogeneous environment into account and should be flexible enough to support any future smart city initiative, no matter what form they take.
The solution provided by Advance consisted of both hardware and software components:
How did we achieve success at CoE?
a. Revenue Protection: The solution deployed has enabled CoE to reduce revenue loss to less than 5%, mostly attributable to technical losses. Since all components of the solution and all events taking place within the solution are monitored 24/7, any irregularities are immediately flagged, and operators alerted.
b. Compliance: Detailed logs of everything that happens in the ‘smart’ environment is saved for audit and compliance purposes. Yearly external audits are done to prove compliance, and no adverse audit findings have been reported during the last four years.
c. Constituent Satisfaction: As a result of compliance as mentioned before, trust in the solution is high. This has resulted in services related protest action being reduced to almost zero.
d. Retrofit: Existing, ‘non-smart’ meters were retrofitted with technology to connect them to the ‘smart’ environment at a small incremental cost. This eliminated the need to replace older meters and significantly reduced the CoE project costs — roughly 40%.
e. Interoperability: This solution makes provision for different metering and IoT standards and protocols (eg. DLMS, STS, MQTT, etc.), allowing CoE to procure and deploy new meters, or any other IoT device, from any vendor knowing that they will be compatible with the ‘smart’ environment already deployed.
What does the future hold? We are engaged in two major initiatives:
a. SAP Integration: This is a multi-pronged initiative — Firstly the aim is to secure IS-U certification, to be able to leverage SAP’s technology such as AI and ML. Our view is that apart from the obvious benefits that a robust ERP like SAP’s IS-U will bring to our clients’ operations, the Leonardo solution stack will significantly increase the value that a smart metering solution can bring to cities. The Leonardo solution stack enables intelligent technologies to be deployed standalone, or embedded directly into processes, both in a scalable way. Secondly, we are working closely with SAP to ensure that our solution will support SAP’s Cloud 4 Energy strategy, in the future.
b. Smart City Initiatives: Now that the smart meter solution has been deployed at CoE, we have the opportunity to leverage the infrastructure we deployed to accelerate other smart city initiatives. These range from the buying of bus tokens using the consumer interface unit, to tracking pollution and air quality. After all, these initiatives are ultimately more IoT use cases and allow us to address the need for reusability and scalability of the solution, at a reasonable price.
For more information on smart cities visit the SAP Smart City conference microsite and visit Advance and SAP at booth C349 if you are attending.
Advance, a member of groupelephant.com, offers inhouse developed IoT technology as well as large scale IoT deployments to its clients and partners. It has successfully delivered IoT solutions for the last ten years, with more than 45,000 IoT devices commissioned and running on a day-to-day basis.
The Advance solution deployed at CoE consisted of:
a. Hardware: Prepaid electricity meters (DLMS, STS); Consumer Interface Units; IoT Routers; and componentry to connect and control non-smart meters to the IoT network; and hardware test equipment.
b. Software: IoT router firmware, including logic to control non-smart meters; field equipment gateway; IoT landscape monitor; over-the-air-update (of firmware) software; vending interface; MDMS/HES; constituent communication platform (portal, SMS, USSD); and integration to CoE ERP.
Authors:
Philip Loots: Partner, Advance, a member of groupelephant.com
Judy Cubiss: Director of Content Marketing, IM&C and Automotive, SAP Industry Marketing
