An Overview of Smart Meter Connectivity

Smart meters are electronic devices that record consumption, whether it is water, electricity, or natural gas. Electric smart meters do more than track how many watts you’ve used. They will track usage over time, report when you use the most power. They’re used to record and report hourly as well as individual energy usage. They can provide feedback regarding usage to individuals and utility companies. This is why electric meters are the foundation of the smart grid. So what happens when the smart meter connectivity is used?

What are the benefits of smart meters?

Smart meters collect data about the behavior of devices connected to it. The information from smart electric meters is used to create individualized user profiles. Your energy provider may give you personalized advice on how to reduce your energy consumption based on the fact that you have a pool pump or inefficient air conditioner. They may offer to do energy audits to determine ways you can reduce energy usage, if your consumption is higher than the average for similar households.

Smart meters are essential to implementing a distributed power grid. Traditional power grids can accept power coming in from solar panels and bill you only for what you pull from the grid. However, it takes a smart meter to track how much power you’re providing to the grid at peak times when they’re paying a premium for it.

Smart meters are required to be able to track reduced usage during calls to save energy so that brownouts don’t become blackouts. This may result in a rebate on your electric bill or direct payment in return for your conservation efforts. On the flipside, smart meters allow companies to implement dynamic pricing. This allows them to reduce demand during peak loads by charging people more when demand is greatest. They also get more demand shifting, since people get an incentive for doing their laundry at night instead of when power plants are humming to meet the demand for AC during the hottest part of the day.

A side benefit of being able to reward those who don’t pull from the grid during peak loads or for the power they produce is that it incentives the installation of microgeneration or batteries. For example, a company could switch from grid power to battery power or their own generators. Conversely, the greater variability that comes with distributed power generation makes coordination via the IoT all the more important.

There are other benefits to rolling out smart meters for utilities. You don’t have to send people out to literally read the meter. And it is much easier to shut off service since it can be done remotely in many cases.

Why are most smart meters monitoring power usage?

Smart meter networks have an initial expense for the equipment. They also require power to operate and bandwidth to communicate with utilities and other networked devices. The cost-benefit analysis to date has favored advanced metering infrastructure or AMI for electricity but not water and gas. This is why smart meters monitoring power usage are hitting industrial facilities. They are tracking energy consumption while manufacturing control centers monitoring everything from temperatures to vibration levels to product quality.

However, we will likely see several hundred smart water meters installed in the next few years because it simplifies utility management while lowering the cost of service. And in an era of looming water shortages, we may need to use smart meters to manage the water supply the same way we do electricity.

How does a smart meter communicate?

Smart meters could in theory use telephone landlines, cellular modems, fiber optic cables, wireless networks or the powerline network. Most smart meters rely on wireless technology. It is almost universally available. The technology is already affordable and widely understood. Wireless networks are scalable, whereas powerline networks lose speed over distance and work better alone.

They overwhelmingly rely on embedded antennas to reduce the risk of damage due to exposure to the elements. Smart meters often use DDRR antennas because of their compact size, though monopole and wheel antennas may be used.

Do smart meters need a power supply?

Yes. Smart meters of all kinds require power both to operate and connect to the internet of things or IoT. However, the use of smart meters can dramatically speed up the restoration of power to an area after a blackout. The real-time data from the power grid theoretically allows for issues to be addressed before there is a systemic failure. But when the power goes down, the smart meter will either go dead or switch to battery power. Not all of them have built-in batteries.

How do smart meters connect to the Internet of Things?

Wired solutions are out of the question for most smart meters. Smart meters are already not cost-effective unless it can dramatically reduce electricity usage. And that is taking government and utility company subsidies into account because it is cheaper to reduce usage than build more power plants.

So what are the most common connectivity solutions? Smart meter connectivity is overwhelmingly wireless. Cellular connectivity like 4G and 5G is expensive. First, it requires a great deal of energy. Second, the bandwidth is already crowded, and that’s only going to get worse. The frequency hopping technology used in short-range wireless systems reduces interference, but that adds to the cost and energy consumption.

One solution for smart meter connectivity is a low power wide area network that reports to a centralized hub or backbone. This receives the information, processes it, and sends essential data to the central processor or utility company. Edge computing systems thus reduce the amount of data that has to be sent through major telecom networks. Power line communication systems are only practical within a private residence or an industrial facility that’s using their power lines to create a private IoT for power management.

Do smart meters rely on 5G?

The short answer is no. 5G tends to use higher frequencies like 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz so they can meet the data-intensive needs of consumers like streaming video on-demand. Smart meter connectivity tends to be a lower frequency like those used for 2G and 3G. It may even operate at the 900 MHz frequency range used by your old wireless phone. This is because the bandwidth required by power meters is less than 10,000 bits per hour. The tragic irony is how many people reject both 5G and smart meters out of fear of radiation when smart meters don’t use 5G and neither uses frequencies that present any type of risk to the public. After all, their smart meter may use the same frequencies that their wireless gaming console or Wi-Fi router does.

What wireless communication methods are used by smart meters?

We’ve already mentioned that smart meter connectivity doesn’t require competition with high-frequency 5G signals. Utility companies and industrial firms can use almost anything. Cellular communications are expensive. Wi-Fi is a popular alternative. For example, you may hear the term Wi-SUN used. Wi-SUN stands for wireless smart utility networks. Wireless mesh networks are commonly used for smart meter connectivity, as well. Low power long range wireless or lorawan networks use license-free sub-gigahertz frequencies. This includes 433 MHz, 868 MHz, 915 MHz, and 923 MHz. These low frequencies are preferred in rural areas, because it lowers power consumption.

If you would like to learn more about smart meters, reach out to the professionals at Geospace Technologies. Visit us online or talk to a representative today.