BPL / AMR: SOLUTIONS FOR SMART ENERGY
How to improve the efficiency of energy consumption ?
Over the last years, energy consumption has constantly increased, shedding light to the inadequacy between power generation capacities and consumer demand.
Building additional plants or enhancing the capacities of the existing ones is only one coin of the solution, as economic and sustainability imperatives also need to be taken into account.
Improving the efficiency of energy consumption is therefore the pace that needs to be strongly investigated.
Growing incentives from States
Climate change is a strong cause of concern for worldwide public opinions. States could not be indifferent to it and many now promote “Green” policies.
The European Union is leading the move, with ambitious targets for 2020:
- Cutting greenhouse gases by 20%,
- Meeting 20% of our energy needs from renewable sources,
- Saving 20% of energy consumption through increased energy efficiency.
PLC technology has a lot to offer to help reach this last goal.
Benefits of using Powerline Communication
Important savings can be reached through energy management based on Powerline Communication, as well as a lot more flexibility for power utilities which can:
- Monitor electricity consumption throughout the grid in real time,
- Implement variable tariff schedules,
- Set limits on electricity consumption to better manage peak loads,
- Manage outages,
- Predict failure analysis
As a consequence, the user has a real-time visibility on his power consumption, and therefore adapt to pay less. For example, during summer, he can increase by a few degrees the temperature of air conditioning during peak hours, or wait off-peak hours to use his washing machine.
Broadband over Powerlines (BPL) offers additional benefits
Intelligent monitoring is only the first step for power utilities. Indeed, they can use BPL based systems to manage their grid, and use the additional bandwidth to provide new value added services to their customers.
For example, they can provide them with broadband Internet using their existing powerlines infrastructure, and therefore get additional revenues.
They can also rent this new broadband backbone to service providers, which will pay a fee to use it.
At a time when the unit of measure for communication is the Mbps and not the Kbps anymore, there is no doubt that power utilities will come to it sooner or later, and therefore using BPL based systems will be the right choice in the mid and long term.
SPiDCOM Solution: