What are the advantages of having a smart meter?

Enel Group is a pioneer in the smart metering technology, constantly improving its services. Enel’s energy distribution subsidiaries in Romania are installing this year over 171,000 smart meters for customers in their areas of activity, following an investment worth over 53 million lei. By the end of 2019, over 671,000 customers will benefit from smart metering systems.

“Smart meters will lay the foundations of future smart grids, which are the defining ones to meet the challenges of the energy transition, promoting the development of clean, sustainable and efficient energy systems,” said Gino Celentano, General Manager of E-Distributie Muntenia, E-Distributie Dobrogea and E-Distributie Banat. “We continue to take advantage of Enel Group’s extensive international experience in digital technologies to install smart meters in all regions served by E-Distributie companies, in order to continue to improve our service quality and to bring more benefits to our customers.”

But what are the advantages of having a smart meter? Enel Group names just a few of them:

– the index can be read remotely, without the need for field reading and consumption estimates;

– human errors regarding reading or consumption billing are eliminated;

– customers can more easily monitor energy consumption, check how much the equipment and light sources in the household consume, and can save as a result of this analysis;

– in the near future, Romanian customers will be able to opt for flexible rates depending on the month, day or time interval;

– consumers will be able to monitor the consumption through Internet of Things applications and will be able to choose, if they will benefit from flexible hourly rates, when it is most advantageous to program the washing machine or to charge their electric car;

– information on normal or detailed consumption is displayed quickly and can be viewed on both the computer and tablet or phone; this allows customers to adjust their consumption behaviour to save energy;

– smart meters allow the transmission of information to the dispatcher of the electricity distributor, so that the network failures can be identified much more easily, and the interventions in case of damage can be performed faster and more efficiently;

– customers are protected from overvoltage and have a chance of faster reconnection if the disconnection was caused by incidents from the electricity network;

– customers save time; changing suppliers, the connections, disconnections, the closing or the transfer of the contract will be carried out remotely;

– the bidirectional function of the smart meter allows the integration in the grid of  the energy generated by prosumers. For those that produce energy with wind turbines or solar panels, the meter will measure separately the energy they deliver and the energy they receive from the grid.

In the medium term, the Enel Group wants to install smart meters for the entire portfolio of 2.9 million customers in Romania.

E-Distributie Muntenia has scheduled for 2019 the installation of nearly 80,000 new smart meters in Giurgiu and Ilfov counties.

E-Distributie Muntenia carried out in Giurgiu county the largest campaign for the installation of smart meters in its area of electricity distribution networks, so that over 90% of the customers in the county will benefit by the end of this year of an intelligent measurement of electricity consumption.

E-Distributie Dobrogea will install over 42,000 smart meters in Călăraşi, Constanţa, Ialomiţa and Tulcea counties, while E-Distributie Banat will install new technology counters for nearly 50,000 customers in Arad, Caraș-Severin, Hunedoara and Timis counties.

For more information on the advantages of smart meter technology, please follow this LINK.

(P)