FAQs

The world is adopting advanced metering in electricity. It has been talked about for several years and now it is happening. So far 32 countries have decided to proceed and the global metering market will increase 56% in five years, with more to follow as further decisions are announced. The gas meter market is following but is some way behind electricity. The water meter market, historically more conservative, is slower to adopt advanced metering but price increases and water scarcity are driving it in that direction.

AMR was once almost the preserve of the United Sates but AMI two-way fixed network metering is being taken up much more widely. National roll-outs have been announced in many European and Asian countries. The largest deployment of advanced meters has been announced in China in the electricity sector. The second largest will be in Britain, with 49 million electricity and gas meters. The Korean government has created a company to operate Homenet, comprising a national smart grid, together with a host of home communication and management services. Greenland will be one of the smallest national smart systems but it will be the most comprehensive, covering electricity, gas, water and heat consumption in every household.  

The report has measured the largest ever expansion of metering, already under way and about to escalate significantly, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. The report is redesigned and greatly expanded in scope compared with previous editions. The changes and expansions have been designed to meet the need of the metering industry for information at their specific request. The metering companies have given strong support and have been generous in time and provision of information. We would like to acknowledge their generous help.

However, it is not all good news. Amidst these exciting developments there are traps for the unwary. There are immediate hurdles to be jumped and long term pitfalls to be avoided. Not every deployment will offer the same opportunities to the international meter manufacturers.

The gas meter market has been following the electricity meter trend to AMR in the US for some years and is increasingly doing the same in Europe, but at a much slower pace. With a new consciousness towards energy efficiency, driven partly by fears about the environment and partly by concern about energy security, gas utilities are now considering advanced metering, jumping from AMR to AMI. The UK is the first country to announce a national roll-out of advanced electricity and gas meters, totalling an enormous deployment of 49 million meters. We predict that gas metering will follow the trend to advanced metering more widely in the next few years.       

The water meter sector is beginning to change, following in the path of the advanced metering revolution taking place in the energy sector, but at some distance behind it. In the US water utilities started to deploy AMR some years ago but it has not reached parity with the energy utilities. The emphasis is now changing for both sectors, to AMI. In a time of rising water prices there is a need to control costs but another important consideration enters the equation for water, scarcity of the resource. In recent years there have been a number of critical droughts in countries scattered over the globe. In some countries which rely on hydropower this has lead to a shortage of electricity, as was the case in Brazil several years ago. In other countries it has affected both industry and the population. In Taiwan in 2008 water was rationed for industry in order to guarantee drinking water for the population. In China scarcity of water is a national priority at the highest level. In the Middle East, Spain, the southern states of America water scarcity is a recurrent problem and water management systems have been in operation for some time. Smart water meters are being deployed to manage the resource and this is a growth area and irrigation meters are also increasingly prominent.

The Multi Utility Meter Report includes a short review of heat metering for the first time.

In some countries metering is seen as a separate service, as a profit centre as well as a cost. Metering services are offered by specialist RBC (Read, Bill & Collect) companies. Some are individual companies, others are divisions of utilities. They offer a variety of services, among them sub-metering services.

Sub-metering is another issue which the ABS report addresses, the penetration and increasing usage of sub-metering, mostly for water and heat. Property owners have always charged their tenants for water, but mostly they include it in the rent or allocate costs by RUBs (ratio utility billing), apportioning the charge according to floor area, numbers of occupants or some such variable. Sub-meters encourage tenants to use less water and they guarantee fair charges. Sub-meters have been around for some years but their usage is growing and we predict more growth. Sub-meters are used not only to measure total consumption but to monitor individual usage points, such as taps and boilers and in the case of heat cost allocation meters to monitor energy use and allocate costs to consumers.

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For more information on the rest of the topics we cover within multi- utilities please go to our multi-utility market research page.