Sentec looks to the future at Metering Europe

Sentec’s Mark England, CEO, will be representing the company’s views on the final day of Metering Europe, based on the paper he has written looking at issues involved in early large scale deployments. He warns that if there isn’t consideration for the radical changes in functionality that are possible over the meters’ deployed lives, obsolete meters could be a problem in the long-run and this could mean complicated and expensive upgrades.

This follows Dr England’s comments at the Metering Europe 2009 conference, where he advocated a new take on the UK’s sluggish approach to the 2020 smart meter rollout target, which the Government now hopes to complete earlier.

Dr England acknowledges the difficulties with future-proofing meters which are to be used for such a large scale roll out, but maintains that this is achievable: “The US is a few years ahead of most European countries in its smart metering rollouts. Sentec’s direct experience of designing electricity meters for this market has revealed that the trend towards sophisticated functionality to manage things like feed-in-tariffs, support home area networks and allow for complex billing is driving design evolution in dependent areas such as code size and memory. The speed with which market requirements are shifting worldwide demonstrates the importance of fully future-proofed meters, which will be in a position to support innovation elsewhere.”

Dr England continues: “At Sentec, we are committed to tackling these challenges head-on through our cohesive approach to meter design, building in room for expanding functionality and building out obsolescence. We believe that future-proofing from this early stage is vital and needs to happen through the market.” Sentec’s forward-thinking attitude to product design has meant that its highly accurate metrology solution, Mobius, has been used by OnStream, a National Grid company, in a meter that will be brought to the UK market and has been designed with the future in mind.

Metering Europe runs from 22-24th September 2010 at Reed Messe Wien, Vienna. Sentec can be found at exhibition location F20.