STANDARDS Metering Communication: don’t bet on the wrong standards Briefly put: Examines the role of current interoperability standards and calls into question whether these are truly interoperable. Examining PRIME, G3-PLC, and OSGP and determining whether the interoperability is truly across the entire system, or just within a few reference layers of the whole communication model. The number of pilot projects with smart e-meters, where double-sided communication has been used successfully, continues to grow. This growing reference information enables us to evaluate both single technologies, and the requirements for more complex solutions. There is no doubt that plenty of nice-looking paper or electronic presentations have been made where the results of these projects has been described. Customers and final users (utilities) are persuaded that there is no necessity to come up with anything new, because the answer already exists and everything is operating perfectly. In fact, it is hard to receive the real results of realised projects and because of this, it is hard to evaluate them reasonably and in a provable way. First of all, you come across to the discovery of zero or (in better cases) very small technical readiness of distribution system operators. The truth is that development in the power industry was evolving and is traditionally very conservative. The possibilities proposed by automated meter reading were sceptically received by utility technicians when initially put forward. Today, we could say that technical progress caught them absolutely unprepared from a technical point of view as well as from the readiness for choice from an offered solution point of view. Political decisions that brought modern appliances with all their advantages and disadvantages to households, and requirements for smart meters (with new communication technologies) deployment, in order to solve power balances, have been received as a real shock to power engineers. It would appear there are no experts in the power sector that could really understand the technical possibilities and who were able to suggest useful solutions. In the better case, teams of experts were only being developed. Managers with a lack of technical knowledge started to use one word that became a mantra for them – “interoperability”. They argued with another sector (in this case telecommunication) where standards are clearly defined and interoperability brings lower prices and vendor independence. However, they do not take into account, what preceded the standardisation found in the telecoms sector. In the beginning, there was a proprietary solution that was, first of all, technically tuned and subsequently, as a stable solution, released to the market. Let’s wise up the contest of single solutions preceded So, from hardship comes enlightenment ModemTec’s lab for PLC communicaton development and testing comprises 5 km artificial power network enabling simulation of almost all operational states. 34 METERING INTERNATIONAL ISSUE - 2 | 2014