Whitepapers

WHY UTILITIES ARE CHOOSING SMART LoRaWAN ® CONNECTIVITY www.lora-alliance.org to the primary water metering industry. Providers need to calculate consumption and ensure their distribution network has no leaks and meters are ideal sources of data to support this. The relative simplicity of gas supply means gas utilities are less interested in tele-reading of gas meters and there are tight regulations relating to all equipment that gas providers must comply with. This presents some limitations to the adoption of new technologies that are yet to be addressed so it is likely that gas utilities will follow along later when it comes to becoming fully smart. HOW UTILITIES WILL BECOME TRULY SMART Utilities in general are traditional industries that have a heritage of building infrastructure and monetising by charging based on consumption. The business model is capital intensive but relatively simple and has relied on predictable consumption patterns. However, for the reasons outlined in the introduction, new models are coming into play for each utility type and these are increasingly heavily regulated industries as governments enforce environmental policies. To help the EU countries better reach its 20% energy efficiency target by 2020, the European Commission has established a set of binding measures under the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) with the obligation to provide easy and free access to real-time data and historical energy consumption. This coincides with the plan to connect 200 million smart meters for electricity and 45 million for gas. This will have a direct impact on smart metering and will improve efficiency, with obligation schemes set for energy companies to achieve energy savings of 1.5% of annual sales to final consumers. 5 Put simply, utilities need to know more about the consumption habits of their users and develop better abilities to predict consumption patterns so they can smooth out inconsistencies between generation capability and user demand. For example, it's obvious that solar power reaches peak generation in the middle of day but EV owners recharge their vehicles at night. Something therefore needs to be done to shift peak solar power generation to support overnight vehicle charging. To gain these insights, utilities need to collect data from their customers. However, aside from those that have environmental consciences or already generate power at their homes, there is little incentive for customers to connect to their utility providers. The ability to consume electricity at a cheaper rate at off-peak times is nothing new, but needs to be made more prevalent and marketed to customers more effectively. In essence, though, utilities need to be able to collect data at the point of use and communicate that to computing functions for analysis to distil it down into actionable information that can result in more efficient consumption, reduced bills for consumers and optimised availability of resources to match demand profiles. Connectivity, however, remains the key to making use of consumption data in real-time. Historical data is too passive and reactive to enable utilities to respond to peaks and troughs in user demand, although it is currently utilised to provide a foundation for establishing trends and patterns that allow broad-brush planning to occur. Smart Utilities - Key Trends Common and global goals for all utilities Identified gap or key driver Key trend Approach to close the gap How LoRaWAN can help Improve global efficiency, become more environmentally friendly and safer Water: Protect water 34% of produced water is lost (NRW) Smart water network Migrate from manual meter reading to AMI to enable smart metering analytics Add IoT sensors for water flow monitoring and water leak detection Coverage: 148 networks in 162 countries Matured ecosystem: large availability of smart meters and IoT sensors with LoRaWAN certification Interoperability with standards: LoRaWAN is an open protocol that supports M-Bus and DLMS among major metering stanards Flexible network models: LoRaWAN networks can be public, private or hybrid and have roaming Expand business with IoT applications for Smart Cities and communities Gas: Safer gas distribution Energy Efficiency Directive Smart gas network Adopt AMI for smart gas metering Add IoT sensors for remote monitoring of gas pressure and gas leak detection Electricity: Growth of energy demand Addition of EV and Renewable Energy Energy Efficiency Directive Smart grid Demand Side Management Open smart meters to support new Energy Management Systems with IoT sensors for energy monitoring and demand side management

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