LUMS Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE) conducted a Symposium on 'Smart Metering' in Collaboration with K-Electric on November 29, 2018 at CS Smart Lab, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). The event was attended by different renowned electric companies including K-Electric, LESCO, MEPCO, IESCO, TESCO, PESCO, NEPRA, NTDC, USAID, Tetra Tech, Alter Consulting, PITC, KICS, BarqBox, Techlogix Pakistan, Hassan & Hassan Advocates.
Diversity of angles within the electrical and technological domains, the conference discussed and threw light on number of terms and concepts in order to discuss the bigger picture. From 'Smart Metering' to 'Advance Metering,' many applications were talked about.
“Smart metering is about consumer-end, which is not covered as an essential goal, it will not do justice to energy sector improvement policies. Therefore, consumer must be the center of attention. Lots and lots of data will help in proper segmentation of consumer to determine their behaviour and consumption requirements.”
“Second important section in energy chain development is Networking i.e. proper networking must be applied so that the data availability to field is before time. According to a case study at K-Electric, bill recovery increases as the accuracy in billing improves.”
“Components of Advance Metering Infrastructure (AMI) are Smart Meters, Communication platform, Head-Ends, Billing Engines, Meter Data Management (MDM) unit and Analytics.”
The conference also discussed number of challenges and how they can effectively be addressed.
“There are some challenges being faced to the growing smart metering industry, such as post implementation maintenance requires skilled labour, under-developed markets not willing to accept the emerging industry, customer sensitisation where customer is not willing to share data, data security, change management, integration, interoperability and standardised communication protocols.”
“Some remedial techniques to overcome these challenges are robust maintenance and training of maintenance staff with regional expertise, customer engagement and incentives, pilot research projects, architecture design and clarity of solution and standardisation, dedicated communication and modular meters/technology change without meter replacement, preparation of competitive market using short term forecast.”
Symposium concluded with exchange of number of new ideas along with multiple proposals for solutions. "For all these applications huge amount of data is required, as having this data takes the process to the domain of Big Data Analytics."
