This is the second part of our talk with the President and Executive Director of DLMS UA, Sergio Lazzarotto. We discussed the future of smart metering and the next moves towards influencing the legislation change through collaboration with other organizations in the industry. Sergio shared his most valued lessons.

Click here to read the first part of the interview.

We are witnessing the mass implementation of smart meters throughout Europe, so we can say that smart metering has come to life. What are the next steps? In which direction will further development proceed and how do you see the future?

I would say that it’ll go through the same disruption as the telecommunication market faced at the end of the first decade of this century. In the beginning, customers were charged for the minutes spent. Later on, these customers were charged for the data they consumed, and the way they consumed that data. Some examples are Video on Demand and Music on Demand.

Now we face this transition, and we are already seeing the emergence of the energy-as-a-service business models. Buying energy when you need it, for how long you need it, in the quantity you need it, particularly if this is a recurring consumption.
A good example of this is the e-mobility or in other words the way electrical car charging station are used, particularly those in residential environment. You plug the car and the car starts charging. If you were to save money depending on the time when you accept to charge the car, that would be more convenient for you as a consumer. To the opposite I may, as a consumer be interested to pay a premium to have my car charged to a certain level the fasted as possible, even though the DSO could limit the demand during peaks time. This is what we call consumer digital convenience. The digitalization should offer now to the consumer the possibility, while connected to the grid, to decide when, for how long and how much energy will be needed and the grid should adapt the supply accordingly to this demand. Sometime constraining it but most of the time as demanded. The same as it happen in the telco world where even though you have a subscription for the 5G with 200Mb/s of communication speed, in some areas or cases these performances are not reached, and we as consumer accept this independently of the subscription service we pay for. I believe that this will open a new world of business opportunities and the digitalization of the energy & water last mile will enable this.

In the future, this could open the doors for other players providing these services to the consumers, to emerge. Not necessarily competing with them but adding value to what the PUs will do. This model forces us to look now at one important aspect: the accessibility to data. While these new players might be able to create and offer added value through consumer digital convenience, the major question our industry has to address is how data can be shared to enable this convenience. We must address privacy and the highest degree of data exchange security.

Do you believe that the European Commission should help DLMS in order to achieve that?

Not only helping DLMS but the whole energy industry. Here, the legislation is playing a pivotal role. Today, there are laws concerning the use of data. Yet, these laws were made ten years ago or earlier. At that time, digital convenience was not actuality. Today this is no more the case, and the legislation needs to evolve defining the legislative framework guaranteeing this digital transition, helping to protect consumer privacy and data security while guiding the industry to standardization. The DLMS User Association is one of the most recognized standardization associations in this ecosystem of energy and water for data exchange protocol between intelligent devices. We believe DLMS can play a significant role. Collaborating with other standardization bodies and other associations representing diverse industry sectors to help lift these legislative barriers enabling digital convenience.

It is important that each one plays its role. The legislative body defines the legislative framework, and the standardization bodies representing the industry should standardize. The legislative body must work fully independently, but collaborating to help address these kinds of problems and raising the voice for our industry is one of the most important missions of DLMS. We should avoid the legislative body being forced to rely on consultants to do the job our industry should be responsible for. It is extremely important that at the early stages when new innovative services or devices are designed, the standardization and the appropriate legislation are aligned to converge toward the same goal to maximize the potential. Letting the legislation and/or the standardization behind and addressing the problems only once the market reaches a certain level of maturity is often too late, because of the time needed by the standardization and legislation to adapt accordingly.

What do you think, how can we achieve a higher degree of standardization in these new areas that are developing after the implementation of smart meters? How to achieve true interoperability – compatibility?

Countries do not have the same level of maturity, so are the national standardizations even though they start from the same foundation which often is IEC. It is important to understand that international standardization often reflect the common denominator of these countries. Consequently, for these countries I am calling the “fast runners” most of the time, they don’t have standardized solution for the innovative problems they want to address and most of the time they will do the standardization work by themselves. If DLMS is not collaborating with these “fast runners” and works in a reactive mode, not only we will always be late, but we could face impossible standardization situations to address later on when, what these “fast runners” have deployed will become mainstream for the rest of the countries with an immense legacy to deal with.

If DLMS works in a proactive mode – working together hand in hand with these national standardization associations particularly with those “fast runners” countries and involve them with the standardization activities we’re doing, not only we could help them guaranteeing an alignment with what we do, but we could prepare the ground for the innovation through the standardization these “fast runners” countries need so when it becomes mainstream it has a natural fit in the standard we develop.

For example, last November we announced the liaison between DLMS and the standardization body of Italy – CEI. We are currently collaborating in the DLMS UA Electrical Vehicle Charging Station working group with Italy influencing and helping us in aligning what we do with their needs. Next summer DLMS UA will release the DLMS UA Electrical Vehicle Charging Station Generic Companion Profile, and it will include most of the CEI’s needs beyond those innovative features developed by the DLMS working group. Working pro-actively with national standardization committees make our standard instead of being the lowest common denominators of today becoming the greatest common denominator of tomorrow.

We want to make more of these liaisons with different national committees in different countries, and not only in Europe. With this, we can make sure we can develop generic companion profiles application-specific with compromises satisfying the maximum of the needs. Will we satisfy all the needs? Probably not, but it’s worth trying.

This will be a major breakthrough in device compatibility. Compatibility is also in the interest of the manufacturers as well. They can offer off-the-shelf, already standardized cheaper solutions, produce larger quantities targeting larger markets, etc. And the consumer will have a larger choice of compatible suppliers, often at cheaper prices. In addition, for the companies developing the devices, the device development cycle will also be shorter thanks to standardized platform development making the use of engineering resources more efficiently. It is a win-win for everybody. The experience I had in the PC industry is that standardization has been a tremendous vehicle of business growth for the whole industry and several market leaders took advantage of this, surfing the wave – while others tried to protect their business by resisting or delaying the standardization and have been kicked out from this business.

Should the M441 Mandate be revisited to achieve compatibility, and should the energy industry through the associations representing it, try to push for accelerating the legislative evolution which is needed?

As the first step, I think we would need to close the loop of the legislative framework. We should address the missing piece of the M441, and that is the data access. I know there is some work ongoing about this and I look forward to seeing the outcome. Today, there are a number of data that are available in the smart meter and some of these might be interesting to use for third-party devices. We need to address this to enable easier integration of intelligent devices in the last mile. However, what is important is not to look to define yet another standard to overcome the legislative barriers, but rather to reinforce existing standards while working to remove these legislative barriers together and leverage on the invested capital.

An electrical vehicle charging station, for example, needs to know what the available energy in the residence is to optimize its energy demand. This is information that is available in the smart meter. If this information is shared with the electric vehicle charging station, it would know how much free energy is left at each instant and consequently balance its demand. Connecting the electric vehicle charger to the smart meter is the most economical solution, producing the minimum waste. We just need to make the standard evolve with the legislation, hand in hand.

Another aspect is the device commissioning and decommissioning particularly for wireless devices which often add an additional level of complexity. Here as well data security and privacy need to be taken into serious consideration and not be compromised.

You mentioned working with other associations such as CEI, IEC. Do you see your organization working closer to other similar organizations in the future?

We’ve been signing liaisons or just collaborating with many different organizations, standardization bodies and national committees in Europe and other continents as ANSI which has adopted DLMS Standard as part of their C12 Suite. This activity is strategic for DLMS User Association, and we will continue developing it and I encourage you all to stay tuned as there will be this year major announcements.

And what about your cooperation with OMS (Open Metering System)?

We are collaborating with them like we were in the past. This type of collaboration is more driven by DLMS UA Members when facing hybrid projects where both DLMS and OMS standards are used particularly in multi-utility ecosystems.
That said, end of last year we created working groups for water, gas, electricity, and heat. Each of these groups will work on generic companion profiles. The first generic companion profile released will be for the electricity smart metering next summer, followed by water and gas, and then the heat and we plan to offer solutions for multi-utility projects which will be fully based on DLMS/COSEM Standard, but also when needed for legacy reasons or for other reasons we will continue to support projects based on OMS standard.

What is the most important lesson you learned throughout your career?

There were two.

The first one is, never to give up. If you’re the first one to believe in something, don’t give up and try to convince others to follow you. But if you try to convince others for something in which you do not fully believe it will fail.

The second is the “not invented by me” syndrome. Often people reject the change when it comes from somebody else. This is the death of innovation. I believe you should always be open- minded. Don’t reject ideas from people coming from outside your ecosystem, as other people are seeing it with different eyes. They can add value and ideas thanks to their different perception of what you do. Don’t be scared to fail, those who never failed are those who never changed.

Tell us a little bit about your previous career?

I was working in the engineering environment and then slowly moved towards marketing and sales, later on turning to business development and innovation management. This has been driving my career for the past 20 years.

Within my past activities, there were 2 major phases: first, from 1995 till 2010 in the PC industry; then 2010-2020 in the smart city industry.

During the first phase, I got the best experience in innovation through standardization. I participated in the standardization of the USB and Bluetooth. At that time, both were standards starting from a blank page. There were problems to address and a mutual intention of market leaders to address them together before trying to go to the market with fancy solutions to protect “their soup”. No technology, no standard, no legislation framework. And now? The USB port is everywhere. Bluetooth is selling in billions of devices and both were huge growth vehicles for hundreds of companies from many different industries. This is the perfect demonstration that Innovation through Standardization doesn’t kill the leader’s business. The standardization can drive market trends while adding value to differentiate from competitors.

Conclusion

Legislation should contribute to the acceleration of the sharing of relevant data between smart meters and different devices or applications, that would open a new world of business opportunities and business players.

The DLMS Association will proactively participate in the preparation of new standards together with national standardization committees and other stakeholders, in order to innovate through the standardization in a timely manner, thus opening the pathway to achieving compatibility but also helping our industry to surf the digital disruption.

The successful examples of achieving compatibility and developing new business models, that can be replicated in this industry, can be found in telecommunications, computers, and others.

Question for the audience

Do you think that access to meter data will contribute to the development of Smart cities? What benefits would users get from it?