Through smart metering, households and commercial enterprises are now becoming much better at gauging their gas, electricity, and water usage. By accessing real-time data, they are able to look at what changes can be made to the consumption behaviour to lower their utility bills and reduce the size of their carbon footprint.

Berg Insights predicts that the number of smart meters across the European continent being used to monitor electricity consumption will be close to 230 million by 2026. Global Market Insights estimates the European smart water meter market will experience a compound annual growth rate of almost 30% in the coming years, reaching a total annual worth of Euro 2.75 billion by 2027. There are numerous different LPWAN wireless protocols that can be used to connect the meter with the display unit that the user will refer to. Among the most popular are LoRa and Zigbee. There is also Wireless M-Bus and Wired M-Bus, which have been created specifically for this purpose, both being defined by the European EN 13757-4 standard. As well as wireless technology, MCUs with strong power/performance characteristics, non-volatile memories, signal conditioning devices and display drivers are all needed.

Through non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) algorithms, it is now possible to get detailed information on electricity consumers’ behaviour, such as what appliances they are using and when. This will be of significant value when it comes to accurately forecast the demands that the grid will be subjected to, although it is vitally important that there is still adherence to GDPR personal privacy laws.

In the past, electricity grids were dependent on a small number of large-scale generation sites such as coal fired power stations. This sort of arrangement is no longer applicable though, as the number of generation sites is increasing, with renewable generation operations of differing sizes, from commercial solar and wind plants through to microgeneration and residential sites all contributing. As a consequence of energy coming from so many distinct places, decentralised grid architectures will be mandated, with intelligence at all the endpoints where energy is being generated or stored.

The system solutions employed will need to take into account the utility landscapes of different geographic regions. Some countries may only have a few utility companies and rely on one predominant source, while others will have many utility companies and a mix of energy sources.