From smart meters to smart cities
With the expansion of urbanisation, countries all over the world are developing ambitious technology driven large-scale smart cities that are fully monitored and controlled. This is done through unified platforms that incorporate smart electricity, water and gas meters, smart street lighting, smart waste management and smart parking among other IoT applications.
The success of such smart cities requires seamless integration between the different parts of the puzzle including unified billing mechanisms and the incorporation of robust, reliable and secure communication infrastructure.
In today’s modern distribution sector, utilities for electricity, water and gas mostly have complete autonomy allowing them to explore unique and interesting communication technologies and integration techniques that are largely un-standardised matching their current needs and expectations.
However, once the inevitable transformation to smart cities happens in search of greater efficiency, lower operational expenditure and higher quality services for citizens, these utilities will feel like islands that are unable to mesh together. In order to avoid this pitfall key stakeholders including governmental regulators, utilities, system integrators and solution providers must have the foresight to realise that strategic investment in future-proof smart metering technology is an integral part of establishing successful smart cities: acting as the catalyst for transformation that will help resolve interoperability issues and ensure that today’s deployed technology stands the test of time.
The leap from smart meters to smart cities requires a multi-layered approach that starts with the incorporation of smart water and smart gas meters together with the electricity meters. This raises the bar for project developers and solution providers to plant the seeds for seamless future integration between these currently independent solutions regardless of whether the infrastructure is ready today or not. To do so, we need to start by ensuring that all electricity, water and gas metering products are DLMS compliant, thereby guaranteeing that the foundation upon which the solution is built is solid. This means the incorporation of smart electricity, water and gas meters onto a unified platform would be a smooth process.
The second layer to consider is the type of communication itself because it isn’t simply enough to unify the smart metering foundation through DLMS but to also explore issues such as lack of necessary integration of communication standards across smart cities. Using broad terminology such as IoT opens the door for proprietary or vendor-specific technologies to creep in, hampering the integration process. Therefore, it is imperative for our stakeholders to seamlessly build a hybrid wired and wireless communication infrastructure that allows for the inclusion of international open protocols and universally adopted key enablers of smart grids. This includes PRIME PLC, TCP-IP for wired fibre optic networks, RF, NB-IoT and 3G-4G if cost-effective (one-size fits all doesn’t work). To do this might seem impossible given the variety and the fact that communication technology is constantly evolving.
