Broadband Smart Meters will Have a Powerful Impact on the New Clean Energy Economy

The next three decades are crucial: climate change and its effects on global warming are boosting a new emerging economy around clean energies, many clean power plants will be necessary to incorporate into the Grid to supply the increasing energy demand while also decarbonizing, and more intelligence and control must be added to reach a more resilient Grid is the most important priority in order to provide continuous electricity service.

Humanity welcomes those giant efforts placed on the development of new technologies to generate clean energy, as they will replace carbon-emitting power plants. New clean energy generation sources will inject electricity into the grid, and these new technologies will be the basis of electricity using the clean fuel of the future.

But carbon emissions don't just come from power plants, but they also come from inside our homes via direct use of gas, presenting another challenge to neutralize carbon. Electrifying homes is a difficult challenge because it depends on individual decisions of householders that use several appliances, devices, and cars, where carbon-emitting is huge.

This scenario leads us to wonder how households motivated by economic incentives make free and climate-friendly decisions to replace devices, appliances, and cars with the newest ones that use clean electricity.

For electric utility companies and energy vendors around the world, this situation presents a fantastic opportunity to increase energy sales by offering discounts to consumers in order to incentive clean energy consumption, but the big question is how to do that using the current capacity of the house grid, and here is where "Broadband Smart Meters" come in the game.

Broadband Smart Meters will be the base to manage in real-time the current capacity of power-width that the electrical grid in houses supports, permitting appliances to make use of the capacity of the electrical grid by increasing the energy consumption without the participation of a protection breaker when the instantaneous current is demanded by appliances.

Current Advanced Metering Infrastructure based on narrowband telecom networks will be replaced by new Broadband AMI using proven technologies such as LTE, which is used around the world. The FCC last year approved the regulation that enables the private deployments of LTE networks in 900Mhz, and this regulation opens the door for modernization of the current grid, generating a new opportunity for innovating, digitizing, and decarbonizing the electric utility sector. This will all be done with a smarter grid, but it would be not easy for any single company to achieve on their own. This is where the great opportunity of being part of ANTERIX active ecosystem comes in.

As EASYMETERING is a company skilled in data networks and cellular architecture, with 15+ years of experience in the metering industry, and as a member of this active ecosystem, we’re not only enabling Smart Meters with our NICs (Network Interface Cards), but we also have the capacity to connect to the LTE network tuned in Anterix’s frequency

(900Mhz-B8) and public bands are available options, but we're also offering a complete AMI Cloud solution, including software for meter reading, meter remote programming, remote connect/disconnect services, meter management, billing system, energy monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, SIM card management, software integration, and more. These features allow Utilities to be more friendly with home energy consumers, therefore allowing it to make sense for electric utilities to invest in Private LTE infrastructure because it’ll not only serve critical mission applications but will also develop energy commercialization.

In international markets like Chile, we are selling AMI as a Service to Electric Utilities and Clean Energy Vendors, where our Smart Meters are connected through Public LTE networks to our AMI Cloud, giving electricity services to homes. In addition, we’re connecting and measuring appliances such as heating systems to the grid through the smart meter of households. With this, energy vendors are applying cheaper electricity rates for these appliances compared to the rest of home electricity rate in order to motivate consumers to replace older heating systems that use gas or wood, creating a real business case for dropping the carbon footprint of these home consumers while they’re saving money.

Broadband technologies will not only be a wide pathway for transmitting electricity data, supervision, control commands, energy monitoring, reading meters, smart meter data analytics, and many more activities around the electricity industry, but it will also be the avenue where Broadband Smart Meters will impact the new clean energy economy because they will permit utilities to create new business models in order to sell clean energy in our future smart homes.