Automatic Meter Reading in Chinese Utility Industry
China represents the fastest growing market globally with a population of over 1.3 billion people and has maintained two digits economic growth rate since last twenty years. At the beginning of 2007, there are approximately 348 million electricity meters, 200 million water meters and nearly 100 million gas meters installed in the whole country of China. Since the fast development of China metering industry in the last ten years, metering practices are undergoing radical changes in the wave of the energy market reform and development.
The new situation with enlarged meter park in China requires that the metering devices are to be automatically read and the measured data are to be timely transmitted to the utilities for improving the quality of customer services and the level of the installed meter park management. The utilities want to improve their services and enhance internal operation management by having the real-time data communication from the meters. These are the reasons why Chinese utilities are drafting or modifying their Enterprise metering standards, and installing pilot AMR projects in different areas, as well as standardizing their technical (including functional) specifications for different market segments.
Message from the State Power Grid Corp of China and South China Power Grid has indicated since the beginning of this year that they are planning to accelerate the construction of “Energy Data Collection and Energy Management” systems, following which, Heilongjiang provincial power Company announced an investment plan of 260 Million USD for constructing their whole province metering reading system. More, Guangdong provincial power company indicated to totally upgrade their system by replacing 11 million meters. These are only part of the picture, several other provincial power are making aggressive progress in these changes.
In Chinese water utilities, similar changes are happening, especially in large cities such as Tianjin, Dalian, Shanghai, Chongqing and Guangzhou etc. Pilot AMR projects have been installed since five years and obtained rich experience, further implementation has been indicated.
As the completion of China “West to East” Natural Gas Transmission Line in 2005, and the fast growing market demand in the Chinese utility market, smart metering concept has gradually been recognized in Chinese gas utility industry. AMR systems have been installed in some smart residential houses.
The first AMRChina 2007 International Symposium, to be held from 13 to 15 November 2007 in Beijing, is specially designed to focus on Chinese AMR market development in electricity, water and gas utilities. There will be multi conference sessions, world-class AMR product display, China AMR Study Tour and more than 20 top level speakers invited from both China utilities and international metering industry. With an expected 150 organizations and 800+ utility executives and metering professionals from both China and international metering fields to participate in this event.
More info at the conference site
October 4th, 2007 16:25
I think an important point to consider is the availability of the meter data to customers.
In the UK (where I’m based), customers that have half-hourly metering can generally freely get their half-hourly data from their energy supplier. This data is of great value for helping the customer to save energy - the detail within the data can reveal a tremendous amount about the customer’s patterns of energy usage, and energy wastage. And naturally the free availability of that data makes customers much more likely to think about getting hold of it, and analyzing it for energy-saving purposes.