Special Report into Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Published at the start of 2010, this 24-page special report looks into the fast-moving advanced meter space in New Zealand.

Advanced metering infrastructure and smart meters are the most exciting technological development occurring in the electricity industry today.

There is huge division of opinion about what is the optimum solution, technology, regulatory framework, rollout, customer proposition, communications protocols and so on.

Maybe this reflects the attitudes to change some in the industry have developed over years of little technological advancement.

Choosing the exact roadmap, technology and strategy right now for advanced metering infrastructure occupies, and no doubts frustrates, the minds of many an engineer and industry veteran. But what we have now is a fast, chaotic, market-led solution, not dissimilar to that which swept through the telecommunications world that followed its plunge into market reforms and privatisations.

Retailers may well not be the correct theoretical future owners of the smart meter, and already there is much discussion emerging from the various retailer-owned metering subsidiaries around agnosticism to technology, functionality, lines company involvement and retailer.

But what we do have, are industry players prepared to invest, and invest big.

Copies of this document are available to subscribers of Energy News free-of-charge, or can be purchased for $150+GST. Advanced meters and the smart grid are subjects regularly covered on Energy News.

For more information on the Special Report into Advanced Metering Infrastructure:

brendan.pfahlert@freemanmedia.co.nz

021 994053