Welcome to the first part of the interview with Davy Michiels, Enterprise Architect at Fluvius.
This is the second interview of Smart Talks season 4. and this time we are hearing first-hand
experiences of multi-utility from Flanders, Belgium. How is their legislation affecting the
country’s smart grid, and what is the future of multi-utilities? Find out below.

What are your personal experiences in implementing Multi-utility so far? Can you tell us a little
bit more about work in general and that related to Multi-utility in your company?

Fluvius is a multi-utility distribution system operator. We are responsible for electricity and gas
distribution networks for many years, but we also have activities in public lighting, sewerage,
telecom and recently also heat district networks are being rolled out.
My experience in this domain started in around 2010 when we started with the technical proof of
concept around smart metering. Since we have electricity and gas networks we searched for
solutions that will support both. In 2010 we also already did some trials with water meters, but
since it’s not Fluvius’s department or activity, we partnered with Flemish region water
distribution companies.
We continued in smart metering with some larger scale pilot rollouts in 2013. This all lead to a
mass roll-out just program for smart meters – we now call the digital meters – for electricity and
gas in 2019. We had to wait on the legislation to be finalised because Belgium was one of the
last countries in Europe to have legislation regarding this topic.
To accomplisch this we launched a big tender in 2017, adopting the multi-utility architecture for
electricity meters and gas meters, but we already foresaw the possibility of other meter
infrastructures too, for example, heat meters, and also water meters. At this moment, in 2023,
we are in the midst of a huge rollout. We will deploy 80% of digital meters in Flanders by the
end of 2024, for electricity and gas. Water distributions also joined in, and since beginning of
this year we are ramping up the roll out of digital water meters together with Pidpa, Farys and
De Watergroep. All meters should be digital by the end of this decade.
At the moment, we are at around 2.5 million electricity and gas meters. Water is at around 100
thousand meters installed

Are there any standards and are you satisfied with the standards in the area of Multi-utility? How
do you see the further development of standards in this area?

In Flanders, Belgium, legislation-wise we are regulated on electricity, gas and heat combined.
For water there is a separate regulator, but the Flemish government is linking everything together, as part of a broader plan full of digital aspirations, not only in this area, but in other as
well.
Legislation also stipulates that we, as distribution system operators, have to provide the meter
data to the customers and the market. The legislation is technically very specific and there are
clear functionalities that meter must support. One of those elements is that the meter should
have a local communication port, that we call P1 port, towards central home energy
management system. We also set up customer portals where customers have insight in their
energy consumption, either directly on our website or through API’ with partners.
The adopted legislation and architecture forces us to have multi-utility offering of the data
towards the customer, both remote and locally on P1 port. Not only electricity data should be
present on that interface, but also the data from gas meters and, water meters are being
included in the near future. Besides that, the software system collects that data and the
customer can have insight into their energy consumption using Web Portal.
Flanders is a quite small area in Europe but densely populated (6,7 mio) and you can see as a
big smart city. It isn’t only about the digitalization of the meters (electricity, water, gas) but it also
includes public lighting management in an interactive way. Public lighting infrastructure can
serve as a mounting pole for other devices in the smart city context. With bringing all that
together you build a smart platform.
That brings us to the question of standards. We experimented a lot and, given our electricity and
gas focus, we have been looking into the DLMS and M-Bus standards. For me personally it is
80-20 rule. The DLMS fulfills 80% of the requirements, but there is still 20% to be defined.
Compared to other countries, Belgium and Flanders are not a big country in terms of material
procurement and we do not believe in the sustainability of defining our own standard. We have
buid our solution using the open standards. Over the last years we worked with the IDIS
association and looked into the Open Meter Specification to fill the gaps in DLMS and M-Bus,
and especially on the integration of both in our multi-utility architecure
The latest versions of DLMS and M-Bus are the enabling layer to implement the multi-utility
setup.
In other areas there are other standards, e.g. TALQ standard for public lighting, but things have
to converge and alignment between standards would be ideal to make an efficient rollout and
use of the devices.

Do you also use OMS (Open Meter Specification)?

Yes. We are in bi-directional communication mode because we have some very advanced
requirements. For instance, our gas meters have a valve which can connect/disconnect gas supply and we use this functionality for prepaying customers. OMS is also good for security and
standards are important to build secure implementation.
When you bring all the data together, it causes a lot of synergy. The electricity meter acts as a
communication hub for other meters, but also as a communication hub to home energy
management system via P1 port, so the security is a must. You are using individual privacy-
related consumption data, you can connect or disconnect the meter and you are acting on the
grid, thus security is really important.

What about interoperability? Do you have different meter vendors?

I think it depends on the scale of the rollout. We did a lot of pilots in the past and we did some
trials, then in 2018 when legislation came and we had to speed up. We had to start with the
rollout in less than a year. We published a tender to procure electricity and gas meters and we
chose a single supplier in order to make speed.
After a while, we launched a follow-up tender to grow towards multi-sourcing. Today we we
have dual sourcing for electricity meters, as well as gas..
On the interoperability side, that is a huge challenge. We use the DLMS and M-Bus OMS
communication standards, but we had to run the integration tests with all the vendors. We have
organized , so called ‘Connectathon‘  test events, where we bring together all meter suppliers to
run integration tests themselves. It required a huge effort from all parties, but after some retries
we succeeded our goal to reach interoperability in a multi-source and multi-utility architecture.
Our ambition is to have true interoperability which means that every meter from one vendor can
work with any type of meter from different vendors. The goal is to optimize the work for installers
and technicians and make everything more flexible in terms of supply chain. That requires a lot
of testing on our side and I think that there is room for improvement in certification and third
party testing process to achieve the interoperability.
For the M-Bus part there is no existing industry standard for neutral certification. This is not a
problem with only water, gas and heat meters, but other devices also, like public lighting, grid
controlling devices, etc. When there is a standard, it should be followed by an independent third-
party certification testing scheme.
Even if you have independent certification testing, like IDIS for electricity meters, we still have to
do additional tests because the IDIS test checks the meter functionalities but it doesn’t test the
interaction of the meter with the Head End System and it doesn’t test the sequence of actions
performed on the meter.

DLMS and OMS are working on standardization, as well as others. What do you think they
should improve in that process?

What organizations should collaborate to further develop legislation and regulation in Multi-
utility? With which organizations your organization cooperates regarding this?
Regarding standards, I would like to have an open interaction with different types of
stakeholders. It is important that that not only manufacturers take part, but the users too – DSOs
in this case.
I think that the standards need to be detailed on protocol levels and have to take into account
the use cases. OMS made that very valuable step and included use cases in their specification.
And the last thing is to implement an independent certification scheme for both protocols and
use cases. This allows the vendors to go to the neutral facility where certain tests could be run
to confirm that the device is compliant.
Before I joined energy industry, I worked in mobile telecommunications and I saw the evolution
from leading up from GSM up to 4G NB-IOT. There are a lot of standards and testing schemes
in telecommunications and I think we should look and adopt a similar kind of structure in the
energy industry. Our assets are digitizing and it will not stop.
Defining the standards is good, but the organizations and associations that are working on
standards should think on the use case level and foresee a certification scheme for them.

Conclusion:
In order to provide consumers with the comprehensive information on consumption of electricity,
water, gas, heat, etc. it seems that there should be some kind of directive from government
body that will link different utilities.
To achieve interoperability, besides standards, it is important to run the integration tests with all
the vendors to verify that all is working as expected.
The standards should include the use cases and develop independent third-party testing
process to verify that the devices are compliant.

Question for the audience
What do you think, should the government body get involved and insist on the implementation of
multiutility?