Welcome to the second part of the 4th webinar of Smart Talks with Jovan. Our guests were:
Klemen Belec – Chair of the Electrical Energy Smart Meter Sub Working group at DLMS UA, Davy Michiels – Enterprise Architect at Fluvius, and Dieter Brunner – former president of ESMIG and the chairman of the board of INTEGRA Metering International.
If you haven’t read the first part, we recommend checking it out before coming back to this one. Read it here.
Are the benefits that a multi-utility brings to customers and utilities enough to be the main driving force behind its development?
Klemen Belec:
It’s always the operational cost, but we all need to understand what the best for society is. And in my beliefs, the driver should be the external one, whether this is the European Commission or someone else.
I’m coming from DLMS, we are now creating the profiles not only for electricity, but as well for water, gas, and electricity, and we are trying to create some standards for the electrical charging infrastructure as well to push multi-utility development.
Davy Michiels:
Are the benefits there? I think yes – internal points, utilities themselves, sharing experiences, building a synergy on IT platforms or in rollouts.
My message on the value will be with the customer in mind. The customer gets a one-stop shop and gets one interface. If we look in Belgium, the market of the home energy management system is enabled by doing that.
The system will get even more complex. The amount of data will grow, and the multi-utility approach is the only way to leverage that. Not all companies can set up a security team or a data management team. The value can only be realized by collaboration.
Dieter Brunner:
There needs to be some information campaign. We should learn from the beginnings of the electricity meter rollout, where we had a lot of discussions with customer protection organizations where we dealt with a lot of misleading information about the misuse of data, etc.
So, we should reflect and show the end user what their benefit is. We need to put the end user in the center. Utilities are service providers, and they need to have customers. A customer stays if they are satisfied with the service that they get.
The benefits are there and need to be brought to light for society to understand.
There is a lot of information and analytics that open up new business models to provide service, maybe to the other utilities, but also opens up a lot of possibilities to provide service through the end engine.
Should the government body get involved in the implementation of multi-utility? And Davy, can you tell us about your experience in Belgium?
Davy Michiels:
Yes. I think that the government involvement is the key element there, but utilities and industry players around this should not wait. The government will not come up on its own.
Simply installing a smart meter doesn’t make the benefits clear for the customer. What happened, in the Belgium case, in the Flemish case, is that the government brought out that message. We did not bring the smart meter as a ‘Fluvius smart meter’ but as a solution for society.
That’s also what we’ve done with the water meter rollout. There is a B2C and a B2B distinction to be made to motivate everybody to take on this role on the journey.
But do not wait for the government, inspire them.
Dieter Brunner:
If you do not act, you might get rules which you might not like.
The government should encourage and should put some incentives. Incentivize those utilities who move, they should get a better tariff or whatever. I think that’s the way to go.
Klemen Belec:
I am also of a liberal mind and don’t like to be strictly directed. However, I think there is one clear point where the government should involve itself.
The fact is that we are talking about the mission-critical infrastructure, and since this is the case, we need to take care of security. There should be a clear level of security described and defined.
The government should set the rules and other Synthetization bodies and associations will define this.
Security on all levels. We have communication, we have data exchange, we have data access. We have data in systems and clouds. There are a lot of questions raised here. We even have data in the mobile apps of our end users and ecosystems. It needs to be controlled.
Should the European Commission get involved to reach the implementation and standardization in the field of multi-utility?
Dieter Brunner:
The real drive came after the European Commission started to drive smart metering in the first energy package, known as ‘20-20-20’ – the 20% CO2 reduction by 2020, giving the end user the monthly correct billing.
It was the start of the drive, for the electricity meter. The good thing they did was not having too much regulation, and saying: ‘This is what you should serve to the customer.’ and ‘This is how the system should look or what elements should be there.’
This helped the utilities as a way to see what needs to be in, and what can be left out. With a clear goal within the next 10 or 15 years, we need to get these things done.
European Commission should discuss with organizations such as ESMIG, Eurelectric, Aqua, etc. I also know that DLMS is supporting this quite well with the new protocols in this area.
Klemen Belec:
I will speak now from the position of DLMS. What we see here that we need to do is quite extensive work on the level of standardization.
That then brings us to interoperability.
In Europe, if I look across the utilities in terms of solutions, we are very diverse. As Dieter said before, some of them started earlier, and others did not. But in the end, looking from the helicopter perspective, the solutions are not that different.
Maybe there is an intention to harmonize those currently diverse solutions.
Davy Michiels:
There should be clearer rules and directions to source the solutions that we need – the assets, meters and sensors, IT solutions and data.
On the security topic, it’s important to set clear requirements, give the right message to the device manufacturer, and to the system integrators what the expected level will be.
Otherwise, we cannot source what we need from the utility in a market-competitive way. There is work to be done.
Conclusion:
Besides having benefits for the utilities and customers in terms of optimization and cost reduction, there is a benefit of enabling a whole new market of the comprehensive Home Energy Management System by implementing and further developing multi-utility.
The European Commission or the government needs to be driving force for controlling the security and privacy of the user data that is spread all over the multi-utility ecosystem. The security of communication channels, systems using the data and data access need to be guaranteed in order to reduce the concerns of consumer protection organizations.
Looking back how the adopting of First Energy Package by the European Commission impacted the implementation of Smart Meters, maybe that is the way that the further development and implementation of multi-utility should be driven.