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29th September 2009

New open standard enables faster roll-out of smart meters

• Cambridge Consultants launches the Universal Metering Interface (UMI™), a new low power, low cost, open communications standard that promises to speed up the roll-out of smart meters and help Europe meet its 2020 climate change targets

Cambridge Consultants has today launched the Universal Metering Interface (UMI™), a new standard for metering systems.  UMI enables manufacturers to start rolling out and installing smart-ready meters ahead of decisions about how they should communicate with the grid, appliances, or other devices.  This helps Europe towards its goal of deploying smart meters in homes and businesses to cut millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions and meet its 2020 energy targets.

Because the end-goal is so important, UMI is being offered by Cambridge Consultants as an open standard for the metering industry to help quickly resolve the communications debate that is currently delaying the roll-out of smart meters.  The new standard has already been adopted by Elster, one of the largest meter vendors in Europe. 

Smart metering is crucial in the effort to make future energy savings and to tackle climate change.  According to the Energy Saving Trust, smart meters can help consumers reduce their carbon emissions by 5-10%.  If the UK as a whole adopted smart meters and reduced energy usage by 5%, this would save £1.2 billion a year on bills and 7.4 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.  The European Commission's 2020 targets require an aggressive schedule for rolling out smart metering technology, but the deployment of these energy saving devices is currently delayed by an ongoing debate about which communication standards should be adopted.

"Communications standards are vital to enable smart energy appliances to talk to the meter and the grid, but the RF interfaces which the Home Area Network (HAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) will use have not yet been selected", explains Alistair Morfey, Technology Director at Cambridge Consultants and leader of the company's smart metering business.  "The UK government committed in May 2009 to install smart meters in all 26 million homes by 2020, but even if roll-out begins in 2013, which is now the earliest realistic date, there will need to be at least 70,000 smart meter installations per week.  Scale this up across Europe and it becomes clear that the debate about communications isn't going to be resolved in time, and that a solution to get things moving is needed.  That's exactly what UMI offers."

UMI is an ultra low power, low cost and highly defined board-to-board wired interface which will allow standard HAN (e.g. ZigBee or Wireless M-Bus) or WAN (e.g. GPRS) communications modules to be added to any metering product, either during production or in the field, when the communications standard has been agreed.  Because the UMI communications module is entirely separate from the MID-approved (Measuring Instruments Directive) metrology components of the meter, there is no need to re-approve the meter when communications interfaces are changed.  This drastically extends both the life of the meter and its marketability to different regions, and makes it future-proof for emerging standards and retrofits.  The communications uncertainty is also delaying product releases for energy displays, home gateways, and smart appliances.  By deploying UMI, manufacturers of all these intelligent energy saving devices can now start to roll them out to homes and energy suppliers around the world, while they are still waiting for communications interfaces to be agreed.

The UMI development underlines Cambridge Consultants' established reputation as experts in both wired and wireless communication technologies, metering and low power design.  Alistair Morfey continues, "We are running out of time to meet the EU targets to which we have committed.  UMI will enable the manufacturers of smart meters to start rolling out their next generation systems now, safe in the knowledge that they can use whatever communications technology is most appropriate for it now, and at any point in the future life of the meter."

Cambridge Consultants and Elster are showcasing UMI on stand 459 at the 'Metering, Billing / CRM Europe' show in Barcelona, 6-8 October 2009.

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