Welcome to the first part of the interview with Shawn Papi, Senior Advisor for ESKOM Holdings.

In this interview, we explored the progress made, the challenges faced, and the future opportunities through the insights of an industry leader.

What are the major factors pushing the adoption of smart meters, the lessons gathered from pilot projects, and what lies ahead for energy distribution across the continent? Read on to find out.

Can you tell us more about your work in the current company and plans regarding Energy field in Africa?

I’m currently mostly involved in research and standardization of smart meters, both at the national and international level. I currently chair the National Committee for Metering in South Africa, and also, at the continental level, I chair what they call AFSEC TC13, which is the African Regional Standardization Commission that has links with the IEC. So basically, my work is to develop standards in the smart metering space and address whatever gaps there may be.

In addition to that, it’s also to ensure that we have sufficient knowledge about those standards as they develop, and also to develop tools to evaluate new technologies as they come in. Particularly, most of my work these days is around communication protocol analysis because, recently, we’ve really widely adopted DLMS protocols. So, we are building capacity to ensure that the products that come into our organization are compliant with the requirements.

In terms of energy developments across Africa, I think smart metering is being driven quite hard, even though I think we do not have well-publicized projects like in Europe. But if you compare from the early 2000s to now, there’s a big drive to adopt smart metering. Mainly, the drive is to ensure efficient distribution operators, reduce the cost of reading bills, and become more efficient in collecting revenue.

So, smart metering is being seen as a solution in this regard. There’s quite a big interest across the continent to ensure that we can roll out state-of-the-art smart metering to address our needs. There have been a couple of pilots, some small, some big, across the continent, but still, it’s progress nonetheless.

One of our biggest differences between Europe and Africa in terms of metering functionality is the prepayment. In Europe, it’s largely managed in the back office, but in Africa, due to legacy and historical reasons, that function primarily resides inside the smart meter itself.

So, the accounting, the calculation of available credit, and the processing of prepayment tokens all take place inside the smart meter. As I’ve said, AFSEC mainly references IEC standards. But when we looked at the DLMS standard in particular, while it covers a lot of functionality, the prepayment part had an open gap. There are elements of prepayment, but they were too general, too generic. So, for Africa, we needed to specify exactly what model must be used, using DLMS and the existing objects in DLMS.

That has now been captured in the African smart metering standard, which will soon be published under AFSEC. This portion is captured, but other issues like remote tariff programming and meter registration will still follow what has already been defined in DLMS. Of course, we can’t just say we comply with the IEC DLMS standard; we need a companion spec.

In that regard, we primarily used IDIS package two as a reference. The reason is that when you look at the catalog of certified devices on the IDIS website, you’ll see a large number of manufacturers implementing compliant devices. For us, that was a low-hanging fruit. So, we took IDIS two as a base and added the prepayment aspects on top. We tried as much as possible to stay within the standard’s confines, and where we saw limitations, we made contributions to the DLMS user association.

We contributed an interface class, published in 2021, and recently made contributions to the generic profile that DLMS will soon publish, mainly around prepayment. The idea is to have a benchmark that’s consistent for all our potential suppliers across the continent, without introducing novel requirements that may not be implementable.

In terms of metrology and safety, these are well-established within the IEC, and we’ve adopted the second edition of the standards published by the IEC around 2022. I also represent the DLMS user association as a member, and as part of the smart metering working group, I’ve contributed there as well.

AFSEC has a liaison agreement with the DLMS UA, so we also have an additional AFSEC representative on the DLMS UA working groups to input our requirements and gain knowledge from those who have already implemented DLMS widely.

AFSEC is the Electrotechnical Standardization Commission for Africa. It was established by the African Union to develop standards for the African continent, mainly in the electrotechnical space. As I mentioned earlier, we are strongly aligned with the IEC, and only where there are gaps do we develop our own standards. But mainly, we lean on what has already been developed by the IEC, with Africa also making contributions through the technical committees.

AFSEC allows us to review IEC standards before they are adopted on the continent, but the majority of what we adopt are direct IEC standards. In only a few areas where we have differences do we address them by either driving changes into IEC standardization forums or, when it’s not feasible, developing our own standards.

The specification will be published soon, by the end of this year.

Based on your experience what is the status of smart metering deployment across African distribution companies and which countries are leading in this space?

I have a lot of information about South Africa, of course. And from interactions with AFSEC colleagues, I have some knowledge of what they’re doing. In South Africa, around 2016, we had an initial pilot, which I would say was the first time we fully adopted the DLMS standards. We were able to deploy smart meters that comply with the DLMS specification and T3 PLC as well.

That population has grown quite well. We’re sitting at around 500,000 plus smart meters in South Africa that are in the field, and it will continue to grow. But when you look at South Africa as a whole, that’s still a drop in the ocean when you compare it to, for example, Eskom’s customer base, which is around 6 million. So there’s still a long way to go in terms of coverage over the years.

You must remember, Jovan, that the definition of what a smart meter is wasn’t concrete when some of these projects started. That’s why I reference the 2016 project, which had a very clear specification of what a smart meter is. It became the single specification that’s now being replicated across the board. From that point onward, at least we had a unified understanding of what a smart meter is in the South African context. So, from that point, the 500,000 plus meters started being deployed, and now there’s a requirement to deploy even more to cover the entire customer base with smart meters.

How long that will take, one can’t say for sure, but there’s definitely a push to get there.

In terms of Africa, Nigeria has been driving smart meters hard as well. Historically, in Nigeria, there were a lot of unmetered customers, and to address that, the government has been pushing the manufacturing and deployment of smart electricity meters. I know a factory was set up there, and they’ve already been able to manufacture and deploy quite a number of those meters. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I know the project is ongoing and successful. It’s also based on IEC standards.

Rwanda is also rolling out smart meters. Compared to other African countries, Rwanda is quite small, but they adopted smart meters from the beginning and now have a large population of them.

I think one thing that’s lacking on the continent is documentation of these projects. For example, in France, EDF will widely publicize that they have deployed 35 million plus smart meters. But on this side, it’s lacking. We hear and know of projects that are ongoing, but we don’t have the numbers. I’m more inclined to say that’s because we’re not dealing with very large populations yet, and it’s still early days for most of these deployments.

In some cases, the technology is still being tested, and in some cases, we’ve done deployments and faced challenges, so we are starting over.

I would say that the biggest installation is in South Africa? Perhaps followed by Egypt, which has quite a significant manufacturing footprint and also has large numbers of smart meters deployed.

Can you share any experience of successful pilot programs for smart metering in Africa and what role does collaboration with international partners play in executing these rollouts?

The one project I’ve been close to is the ESCOM rollout, and that has been quite successful. I think it’s mainly because it was using open standards fully, which allowed us to achieve the required functionality and improve ESCOM’s business processes.

When we started the pilot, the main goal was to collect revenue. So, we needed smart meters that could be remotely converted to prepaid because most of the customers in the pilot area were postpaid. Converting them to prepaid gave us the opportunity to deploy smart meters. When we specified the smart meters, we also made it a requirement that they should be remotely switchable between payment modes. We’ve successfully done that for a number of customers, converting them remotely from one payment mode to the other.

Recently, we’ve had a lot of load shedding, especially in 2023 and earlier this year. In response, we deployed what we call the bulk solution, which is essentially a smart meter with a motorized breaker that can disconnect larger customers, not just residential ones. This project is still in the early stages, but it looks to be very effective. The idea is to not completely disconnect customers but to limit them to a lower consumption. If they exceed that limit, they are disconnected. Essentially, they can still use essential services at a lower consumption rate, and if they exceed that, we disconnect them.

These two projects have been quite successful and have been standards-based. The learnings from these projects have been shared with other utilities in South Africa and through AFSEC to other utilities on the continent. I’ve seen similar technologies being adopted and deployed.

The first project started in 2016, and the second one began in mid-2023. The 2016 project has over 300,000 meters installed. The bulk load-limiting project, which started early last year, currently has around 12 installations, as these are for large power users.

Regarding communication technologies, the 2023 project uses 4G LTE with DLMS, the same smart meter technology used in residential areas. The difference is the motorized breaker, which can disconnect very high currents. The interface between the breaker and the meter via a digital interface is still manufacturer-specific, but over time, we hope to standardize it once we’re certain the technology works as expected. The largest option for the breaker can handle up to 800 amps.

In the 2016 project, we used 3G, with DLMS over 3G, as the communication protocol. We also deployed a large number of G3PLC meters, using DLMS over G3PLC. For prepayment, we used STS technology, following IEC 62055. Those were the three main technologies we deployed.

From an upside perspective, we’ve catered for an option where you might have a meter without a breaker and do the prepayment in the back office. But we’ve also catered for a smart meter that has a breaker with the prepayment sitting on the meter itself. So, both options are doable, depending on a specific country’s needs at the time. For onboard prepayment, we’ve opted for STS because, at the time, it was the only IEC-recognized token-based technology available.

But I think it depends on the end user. If they prefer prepayment to be handled in the back office, they can go that route. If not, they can go the STS route. The only issue is where the breaker sits and who controls it—that’s the main thing.

We’ve predicted all options: with or without a breaker, with or without a keyboard token in the meter. The utility will choose from all those options depending on what it needs. The basis is to use standardized communication protocols to ensure that, regardless of the configuration, you’ll still have interoperability. You don’t have to change your back office setup to accommodate a specific configuration.

For the South African market, for smaller customers in residential areas, for now, the prepayment will sit in the meter, and there will be a keypad for the customer. How we’ve designed it is that the metering part will not be accessible to the customer because we’re not mainly installing meters on the customer’s premises. The meters are outside, either on a pole or on the street side. Inside the house, there will be what we call a customer interface unit with a keypad and a display to allow customers to monitor their usage and also to insert tokens.

At the same time, we do have the option of sending tokens over the AMI network. The meters we’ve deployed are already capable of receiving tokens through that channel, and we’ve had that capability since 2016.

Conclusion:

Africa is advancing in smart metering, with countries like South Africa, Nigeria, and Rwanda leading, but adoption of international standards is needed. African Electrotechnical Standardization Commission (AFSEC) is very engaged in DLMS UA working groups to input African use cases and standard development.

African standards are often aligned with IEC, but specific regional requirements, such as prepayment functionality, necessitate custom solutions.

Successful pilots in South Africa have demonstrated the benefits of using open standards and interoperable technologies, with international collaboration helping address Africa’s energy needs.

Question for the audience:

How do you think the regional adaptation of international standards, like the prepayment functionality in Africa, could influence the global development and adoption of smart metering technologies?