Ready for the green transition with smart metering and close partnership

You see them just about everywhere nowadays. Electric vehicles – EV’s for short – are becoming commonplace on roads and in households. Whilst being a step in the right direction for the environment, this adds pressure to electricity grids mostly built for a different need in a different time. Many sections of the electrical grid are not dimensioned to charge so many electric vehicles at primarily the same time every single day.

To overcome these new challenges, the utilities need more knowledge about consumption, voltage and grid status. This is where Kamstrup came into the picture for Nord Energi Net, a Danish utility covering most of North Jutland, including Skagen, who needed to live up to new regulations demanding remote reading of consumption.

“In 2014, we had 65,000 meters changed to Kamstrup meters, so we now can read our entire grid remotely. We get an insane amount of data from it,” says Peter Jensen, Head of Metering and Installation at Nord Energi Net and adds:

“We already had 35,000 meters from Kamstrup, that we were delighted with, so we were pleased that they won the tender. We have a great and easy partnership with a local Danish company that understands our situation and are quick to adapt to new challenges.”

Peter Jensen has worked at Nord Energi Net and its predecessors for over 33 years. In that time, he has seen the changes in technology, challenges and possibilities that utilities face.

“Earlier, we sent meter reading cards to customers which they had to fill out themselves. People didn’t necessarily fill them out correctly or at all. So, we had to estimate or send people out to check,” he explains.

Now, it is straightforward for Nord Energi Net to settle the bills correctly with the increased data and improved overview of their network through wireless communication from their Kamstrup meters. Peter Jensen believes technology will be increasingly important in the future.

“The payoff for us is saving money and man-hours. We can track ampere consumption and connection fees and get lots of data. We are never in doubt about anything, and there are no disputes anymore with customers as we have precise data,” says Peter Jensen.

Utilities are like an invisible partner that you only really notice when something goes wrong.

“Our job is to be reliable. We try to disturb as little as possible. So, it is definitely a positive that we inconvenience people less because our readings are correct, so they only pay for what they actually consume,” Peter Jensen says.

Complaints and disputes with customers are basically gone, which means that Nord Energi Net and Peter Jensen can spend their time and energy improving their service and being even better in the future.

“They have almost completely disappeared from our world. In the old days, if customers could not pay their bills, they had to deal with us. Now, we can look to the future and help and guide our customers to optimise their consumption,” he says.

The future holds many exciting possibilities and challenges for Nord Energi Net and other utilities. Regulations are getting more ambitious, so utilities have to report data every 15 minutes – four times as much data as presently. Kamstrup’s meters are part of the solution.

“The meters open up many possibilities. I think we will use them for network analysis and how we should dimension our network in the future - and to see if there are places that become overloaded, so we can intervene before the error occurs instead of after,” says Peter Jensen.

Nord Energi Net has 2,600 Kamstrup meters on their transformers. This enables them to make sure they aren’t missing any consumption by comparing total usage on the transformer with each consumer’s total consumption. This has led to some peculiar findings.

“We have found four cannabis labs that were using our power, but not paying for it. I have a case next week regarding 7,000 EUR from this, so the meters pay for themselves quickly. We would not have found them without the Kamstrup meters on our transformers, and we plan to utilise them even more in the future,” says Peter Jensen.

He has seen a lot of changes during the last 33 years and sees even more coming in the future with increasing knowledge, accurate data and technology providing intelligent solutions for utilities and customers.

“When technology enables it, the need arises. Today, we can retrieve data and monitor many things, but only 5-10% of the data is used. In the future, we want to have a systematic overview of charging stations and heat pumps that could cause distortions in the network, and we want to work further with things like voltage, max effect and neutral fault. The future is knowledge,” says Peter Jensen.