Posts Tagged ‘smart meter’

CIBER shakes up the energy market with new CIS system from Junifer Systems

Flexible solutions for the transforming energy industry

CIBER, one of the world’s thirty largest IT consulting companies, has initiated the collaboration with Junifer Systems on the launch of a new customer information system (CIS) in the Nordic market. The new system has taken the market by storm with a much lower entry-level pricing and greater flexibility than competing solutions.

According to the agreement, CIBER will be responsible for marketing, customization, integration, operation, as well as user training and support for Junifer in the Nordic countries.

“Primarily, we will be focusing on Swedish energy companies,” says Johan Barwén, Regional Manager at CIBER, who will be heading the new initiative.

“We have significant experience from systems integration and major project implementation. Some of our consultants have been actively working with electricity industry deregulation since 1996 and many others have over twenty years of industry experience. In addition, we add a proven project methodology that leads to minimized project risks”.

“We are excited about our partnership with CIBER. Their skills, experience and understanding of the local electricity market is unparalleled,” says Paul FitzGerald, Sales Director at Junifer Systems Ltd.

UK based Junifer Systems develops industry-specific business systems for electricity and telecommunications, but also for gas, water, waste management, and other utilities.

Unlike the majority of utility companies’ ageing existing applications, Junifer provides unprecedented opportunities to address the rapidly changing needs of an industry characterized by restructuring, increased competition, deregulation, and increasingly stringent regulatory compliance requirements.

“The system is scalable to fit both small and larger businesses. In addition, it is developed using Microsoft .Net, which means cost efficiency, short development times and sustainability,” says Johan Barwén.

For the utility (gas, water, electricty and waste) operator, the Junifer CIS & Billing products enable them to process the significant increase in data volumes (compared with the traditional utility billing estimate model) and also provides the business with a flexible, scalable and cost effective solution on which the business can build it’s unique offering.

For more information, please contact:

Johan Barwén, Business Unit Manager CIBER AB
+46 708-44 10 72
johan.barwen@ciber.com

Paul FitzGerald, Sales Director Junifer Systems Ltd
+353 87 9926723
paul.fitzgerald@junifersystems.com

About Ciber
IT consultancy CIBER Sweden AB, with approximately 150 employees are part of the global oraganisation Ciber Inc., with approximately 8500 employees and 1.2 billion dollars in turnover. Swedish customers are major banks, insurance companies and several telecommunication companies. CIBER also have assignments in the energy industry, government, logistics, trade and manufacturing industries.

CIBER provides specialist competencies in a number of areas, from business strategists to developers and testers / test leader. This means that CIBER can help their clients from strategy, via realization to maintenance.
Headquartered in Stockholm, with regional offices in Malmö and Sundsvall. See www.ciber.se

About Junifer
The Junifer Systems team has utilised it’s strong background in the complex, large transaction volume Telecomms billing sector to provide highly efficient, flexible and cost effective back-office solutions for the utilities market. The Junifer Product suite provides a complete end to end CIS and billing system designed specifically to support the unique challenges encountered both by the legacy utility systems and what Junifer believes will be tomorrow’s “Smart Meter” billing requirements for utilities. For more information on Junifer Systems, please visit www.junifersystems.com
Headquartered in London, UK.

What is Google PowerMeter™?

About the product
Google PowerMeter™ is a free tool from Google that allows utility customers and private customers with a smart meter installed to access their electricity usage data and other information from their utility company on the Internet. The information is presented on their personal iGoogle homepage but only if they sign up for the Google PowerMeter™ gadget. The gadget uses the information from the smart meter and provides the utility customer with tools to analyse the usage. There will be a tight connection between Google and the utility provider with a logotype and link directly to the utility company website. As a utility provider you can send messages directly to your customers’ iGoogle PowerMeter™ gadget. This could open all kinds of possibilities and strengthen the relationship with your customers.

How to be able to use it?
Well there are actually some things that need to be done before your can start analysing your electricity usage in iGoogle! 🙂
First you need to become a partner with Google within the Google PowerMeter™ project. There are just a few companies that are involved in this project at the moment but Google announces that they would like to add more companies. You can inform Google about your interest as a utility company by using the form provided at this link:
https://services.google.com/fb/forms/powerreaderutility/

When you or your utility company becomes partner with Google PowerMeter™ you need to connect to Google’s PowerMeter™ data repository over the Internet and send electricity usage information from your meter or meter data repository. Google has created a step-by-step guide for the configuration and integration process. The information is stored securely inside Google’s data centers. Google PowerMeter™ doesn’t request information from outside; it just receives data that is sent to it. The format should be in XML based on the open Google Data API.
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/overview.html.
It must be sent via a secured Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s more known as HTTPS.

The customer and user must sign up to participate with the Google PowerMeter™ program to be able to use the gadget that is provided by Google. It’s not possible for a utility provider to upload data if their customer hasn’t signed up yet. The data will be rejected.

What do I gain as a customer?
By accessing the information from my smart meter I will be able to easily understand and reduce my energy bill. The information will make me more aware of the situation and it will also help me to be more interested in how I use energy. By changing small things and become more energy efficient I can save money and also the environment.
There are a number of features developed. For example you can compare your consumption against benchmarks. You can use the Budget Tracker to compare the consumption with historical data from your meter. The Google PowerMeter™ gadget presents your usage in a diagram. The resolution depends on the reading frequency provided by your utility company. There will probably be more functionality developed in the future.

Why should utility companies send information to Google PowerMeter™?
A lot of people have already signed up for an iGoogle account and they login to their account on a daily basis. How often do they login to your utility website?
If there is a possibility to not develop these features on your company website but still provide your customers with the information they wish for it could save you a lot of money.

I hope that we will be able to present more information about the Google PowerMeter™ later.

Here are links to my sources:

http://www.google.org/powermeter/index.html
http://www.google.org/powermeter/docs/powermeter-overview-for-utilities.pdf

Smart Meters from Telenor Cinclus

Here’s a well produced presentation from Telenor Cinclus and their smart metering solution.

They have installed over 1 million meters and provide IP based smart metering solutions. Other utility meters can be monitored and controlled over wireless M-Bus. Their meters can communicate with an energy panel which enables a toolbox for future services. With a mobile energy channel it’s possible to get collected information like consumption, price information and alerts sent to mobile devices like cell phones.

Information can be sent in real-time to a computer equipped with software for further analysing in an understandable way.

The metering system communicates wireless and is designed for a smart grid system.

Watch the embedded video from YouTube

Visit www.telenorcinclus.com for more information

Google Powermeter

Today, I almost accidentally found information about one of Google’s projects. They are planning to use the information from “smart meters” to help you keep track of your energy use at home. I haven’t yet found out what Google mean by smart meters but I guess that they need the metering device or something connected to it to send information to a Google based server by the Internet. The user should be able to login to its Google account and analyze their energy use. In Sweden all meters should be able to send accurate meter standing the 1st every month but a lot of the installed meters reads, saves and sends meter values to a management system and stores all data at a server. The meter readings can also be forwarded through communication lines like PLC (PowerLine Carrier), GPRS, Internet et cetera. I think that it qualifies for Google’s Powermeter.

I have been thinking about this and I think that it’s a pretty good idea to use a Google account to publish this information instead of having all grid owners and electricity suppliers to rebuild there own website with this information. I guess some of you will disagree. Perhaps Google can open their API so that some information from Google will be embedded on “your” website? Future will tell.
An interactive website costs a lot of money so therefore I believe that it would be nice to spend that money on other things. The problem might be that Google gets even more information about you. How will the information be used?

From the information that I have found so far it seems like the electricity use is displayed in a rate the meter can read and save. In the demo it’s hour values. You can’t see exactly what device connected that is used at the time. You can only try to analyze this information from the diagram displayed as far as I know from search in the web. I would like to see smart meters that know where the consumption comes from. In a nearby future I think that all new devices like TV, computers, radiators and perhaps even your energy saving lamp will be able to send consumption information by a wireless connection.

I will try to find more information about this and come back!

Here comes some links and videos! Thank you for you time!

www.google.org/powermeter