Smart meters are an important component of smart electricity usage, serving as the "end effector" for achieving bidirectional interactive smart electricity usage. They support functions such as bidirectional metering, automatic collection, tiered pricing, time of use pricing, freezing, control, and monitoring. In addition, smart energy meters can also provide users with many electricity services, including distributed power metering, interactive services, smart homes, smart communities, etc. The electricity meter industry in our country has gone through the stages of mechanical electricity meters, ordinary electronic electricity meters, prepaid electricity meters, and now widely popularized smart electricity meters.
The next generation of smart meters will be equipped with more functions beyond traditional metering services. It can achieve both in system business (operation and maintenance support, metering, orderly electricity management) and ubiquitous business (comprehensive electrical fire protection, new energy access, energy efficiency management, water and gas data collection, residential anti-theft, energy storage management, other applications, etc.). The application of IoT technology in the next generation of smart meters is one of the key intelligent terminal products for the construction of the "two networks", which plays an important supporting role in the informationization, automation, and intelligence of the power grid. With the promotion and implementation of the "ubiquitous power Internet of Things" construction, as well as the demand for replacing existing energy meters, the next generation of smart meters will have a broad market space.
The new generation of smart meters is expected to be piloted in 2020, and multiple meetings have been held to promote the research and development of new meters
The industry has been seeking to upgrade and develop smart meters in recent years. As early as 2017, State Grid proposed the research and development of "dual core" smart meters. Starting from 2019, State Grid has joined forces with various industries to promote the research and design process of the new generation of smart meters. It is expected that by 2020, State Grid's new generation of smart meters will be connected to some provincial power grids for operation and product design improvement.
At present, the research and development of the new generation of smart meters, as well as the formulation of standards, are steadily advancing with the active cooperation of all parties. The presence of the new generation of smart meters has also frequently appeared at recent meetings. In April 2019, at the conference of the Ubiquitous Power Internet of Things Industry Ecological Alliance, the leaders of State Grid Information and Communication Industry Group proposed that one of the guarantees for building a ubiquitous power Internet of Things is to design and develop a new generation of smart meters, achieve energy and temperature measurement, and collect and control electricity information for large capacity loads in users' homes; In June 2019, at the seminar on electric energy metering technology based on the ubiquitous power Internet of Things framework, the National Center for the Promotion of Electrical Instrumentation Productivity introduced a new generation of smart meter design solutions. The new generation of smart meters is about to emerge, and the demand for meter replacement will significantly increase.
At the beginning of 2019, Shenzhen released a domestic smart energy gateway, which adopts a design that separates metering chips and management chips, and introduces multiple technologies such as non-invasive load identification, minute level data collection, and centralized data collection of multiple meters such as water, electricity, and gas. It can effectively support applications such as intelligent power supply services and comprehensive energy services. Compared to general smart meters, smart energy gateways have multiple practical functions, such as real-time monitoring of electricity safety, accurate fault location, load identification, and support for energy service expansion. They also represent the trend of realizing the functions of the new generation of smart meters.