Does smart energy metering need a large, expensive, central communications infrastructure? Not according to First Utility. Steve Hobson reports.

Anyone who has waded through the Energy Retail Association's 200-page Supplier Requirements for Smart Metering - and I am the first to admit that I haven't - will tell you how complicated smart metering will be.

Intelligent meters will need a large, centralised communications backbone to collect, consolidate and disseminate the vast amounts of data that will be collected from 46 million gas and electricity meters, at a frequency of up to every half an hour. Standards will be required for interoperability and data transfer to ensure meters do not need to be ripped out and replaced if a customer switches supplier.

But does smart metering need to be like this? Not according to First Utility, a small energy retailer that has recently begun to offer housing developers and individual customers a smart energy package.

Speaking at one of the company's most recent installations, at the apartment development Royal Connaught Park in Bushey, Hertfordshire, sales director Martin Moir explains that smart metering is essentially simple but will cause problems for most retailers' billing systems.

"Smart metering is more about billing than the technology," he says. "We come from a telecoms background and built our own billing system, so we are not starting from the point of six million customers getting estimated bills."

Assets stranded

First Utility now has 15,000 smart meters in operation and is naturally concerned that whatever form the national domestic rollout takes, these assets should not be stranded.

"Ofgem approved the meters and the data comms are standard, so they should be accommodated in any future system," says Moir.

First Utility uses Iskra electricity meters that store half-hourly readings and transmit consumption data direct to First Utility, using a mobile phone SIM card where the meter is installed in a single dwelling and there is a reliable signal.

In Royal Connaught Park - a former boys' school now converted into 334 luxury apartments - electricity meters are installed in the basement and hard-wired to a data concentrator, which has a SIM card and a high gain aerial to transmit the consolidated half-hourly data.

Standard gas meters located in external boxes are fitted with First Utility's own low frequency radio transmitters. These send daily readings to the electricity meters, where they are stored and forwarded with the electricity consumption data. "Most recent gas meters have a pulse output and we simply plug in our low frequency radio transmitter," Moir says.

Data consolidator

The landlord's three-phase electricity meters are also wired to the data consolidator, which sends daily readings along with the tenants' gas and electricity meter reads.
"We poll the concentrator once a day to get the half-hourly electricity reads and daily gas reads," says Moir.

Customers get monthly bills based on actual usage, with graphs and tables showing consumption compared with previous periods, and can see the daily meter reads on the web.

Although the meters are installed under a contract with the developer, First Utility works hard to persuade the incoming householder to stay as a customer, offering a range of tariff options, including two and three-tier time of day rates to encourage off-peak use.

"We work to promote the solution to tenants," says Moir. "The majority of customers stay with us. We offer competitive prices and simple, accurate billing."

In the event of a customer switching to a different supplier, the smart meter stays in place and can be manually read by the new supplier, or First Utility will provide remote reads for a fee. Although they are usually installed by First Utility, the meters remain the property of the designated meter operator. "Although there is an additional cost in installing a smart meter, the customer is likely to stay with us," says Moir. "We don't charge the developer or customer an exit fee - the risk is with us."

The company has looked at picking up data from water meters but Moir says it "has enough on its plate with energy" at the moment. Of more interest is heat metering in developments with centralised boilers supplying hot water to individual properties. "If the heat meter has a pulsed output, we can treat it just the same as a gas meter," he says.

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