Toward a Unified Effort for AMI Standardization
The EU OPEN Meter Project
Due to increased liberalization of the European energy markets, which include gas, water and electricity utilities, the need for standardization has been understood. The latter is needed to be able to organize and assess the available energy settings of the respective member states.
At present, standardization in Europe is under the responsibility of the European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. They cover roughly the same areas as their corresponding global organizations, IEC, ISO and the IUT respectively. Between the European organizations and their global counterparts a strong co-operation has been established via bilateral agreements. European standards therefore may be a combination of adoptions or integration of International standards, or “home grown” standards, established by the ESOs.
There are many hot subjects for standardization deserving our attention from electric cars to nanotechnology, but this article wishes to focus on standardization for smart metering.
Smart Metering systems and Advanced Metering Infrastructures (AMI), in the wider context of smart grids, are in fact a main part of ongoing standardization efforts in Europe, as they are in several other areas of the world. An AMI should help to achieve such important goals as improving energy efficiency, integrating distributed renewable energy sources, leading to an improvement of security of supply, decreasing the dependence on fossil fuels and protecting the environment. Fostering the operation of the energy markets, providing better service to energy end-users and creating new knowledge-based industries are other important objectives. It is also widely recognized now by all, that such a new infrastructure can be successfully created only if proper market regulation is in place and if the systems are based on open standards.
Smart meters are in use already in the commercial and industrial sectors for many years, but the European market in the small commercial and residential segment essentially has been sparked off by the European Directive 2006/32 on energy end-use efficiency and energy services, demanding – among others – better metering. Most European countries have launched smart metering projects and some have made a considerable progress.
Although several International and European standards have already been established and successfully implemented in Europe and elsewhere, the European Commission perceives the lack of a comprehensive set of open standards covering all utility commodities, all AMI and DER control requirements and all communication media, as an important barrier to a wide scale adoption of smart metering and building the European AMI. To remove these barriers, the EU has decided, within the Seventh Framework Programme – which is the EU’s main instrument for funding research – to fund now a collaborative research project, known as the OPEN Meter Project, to develop open-access standards for smart multi-metering services.
The OPEN meter project, Open and Public Extended Network meter (www.openmeter.com), unites worldwide leading electricity, water, gas and heat meter manufacturers, alongside with some of the largest European multi-utilities, as well as research institutes, universities and standarization organizations. The consortium participants are European utilities such as:
And companies such as:
The latter is having a major role in the project as the testing of chosen standards and protocols falls under its responsibilities and management being the WP4 (testing) leader. KEMA is also appointed to the role of the technical coordinator of the project and which one of its major duties to coordinate the technical board activities and ensure that the deliverables are being collected and reviewed according to the project time scale. The OPEN meter consortium has now gathered 19 experts in a move to display the know-how of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure currently available on the market. Through a well planned project of 30 months until the June 30 2011 and consisting of seven different workpackages, the participants of the OPEN meter project will work on establishing requirements, reviewing and assessing existing technologies and standards, identifying and filling gaps, testing solutions and finally drafting a suite of standards suitable for European standardization.
In addition to the above mentioned driver for standardization efforts is the Standardization Mandate M/441 of the European Commission (which was issued on March 12 2009), which was given to CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, in the field of measuring instruments for the development of an open architecture for utility meters involving communication protocols enabling interoperability. The mandate requires the development of European standards comprising a software and hardware open architecture for bi-directional data exchange with utility meters. The latter should support a wide range of applications and emphasize the importance of a secure interface to the protected metrological block.
Another task is the development of European standards for additional functionality, to achieve full interoperability. The ESOs are expected to present a work programme by September 2009, and then to develop the communication standards within nine months and the standards for additional functions within 24 months. For the preparation of the response, a Smart Metering Coordination (SM-CG) group has been set up, with the involvement of the relevant Technical Committees and other major stakeholders. The OPEN meter project is among the organizations invited to take part in the work.
At the first OPEN meter project workshop, which was hosted at the CEN/CENELEC Meeting Centre in Brussels, and attended by more than 40 participants, the objectives were presented to a panel of users and stakeholders. At the same time, the first three deliverables of the project, "Advanced Multi-metering Metering Infrastructure (AMI) requirements, " "Regulatory requirements " and "Description of current state-of-the-art of technology and protocols, " have been presented. The panel of users and stakeholders is made up of CEN, ERA, ESMIG, EUROGAS, EURELECTRIC and EUTC, the European Commission and the representatives of the stakeholders executing the mandate M/441 on smart meter standardization, including the representatives of the SM-CG.
At the end of the workshop, it was agreed by all participants that the objectives and the timeline of the OPEN meter project are very much in common with those of standardization mandate M/441. Several follow-up coordination meetings have been scheduled for the standardization community to benefit from the project deliverables.
ESMIG, the European Smart Metering Industry Group (www.esmig.eu) is another important player and contributor. Recently, they have established a partnership with CENELEC and ETSI on the field of standardization for smart metering. Several members of ESMIG are already represented in the Technical Committees of ESOs and in the OPEN meter project. A formal partnership with the ESOs should further improve co-operation.
The current situation is very promising. In addition to the above mentioned initiatives, in which the main parties are already present, there are almost countless organizations and national initiatives addressing the issues of smart metering and proposing technologies and standards. The coming period, one main challenge remains. All parties agree that harnessing all these initiatives into a coherent set of generally agreed and adopted standards is a major challenge ahead. The standardization initiatives of the European Commission seem to have succeeded to bring all major stakeholders around one table and to foster a good co-operation between them.
At present, as KEMA, we have a good chance that the challenge will be met. This will be crucial for the success of smart metering in Europe. There is a strong feeling that the participation of global players in European standardization efforts on the one hand, and co-operation agreements between the ESOs and the Global Standardization Organizations on the other hand, the new European Standards – as this is the case already with some existing standards – will be successfully used worldwide.
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