The insights accrued from smart metering can help an MNO or towerco understand how to reduce energy opex. The smart metering roundtable at the TowerXchange Meetup Europe 2017 brought together European tower owners with a broad spectrum of power experience to discuss the possibilities which these smart solutions can offer.
The roundtable discussed the definition of a smart meter and what it can achieve, with smart meters replacing meters which are just for billing. There was a discussion around who provides the meter - do you get access from the electricity provider or do you source your own meters? One towerco at the table stated that they have acquired their own so they can track what each tenant uses and bill more appropriately. Even if the utility company provides a meter, if a tower owner has four operators on a tower, it’s worth their time and investment to add in a submeter to enable more visibility over power usage.
Who is responsible for power?
The participants discussed who takes responsibility for power in European telecoms infrastructure and how, when power is passed through, there’s no incentive to make it less expensive; once a towerco offers power as a service they have a strong driver to bring the costs down. Whatever the outcome if a towerco wants to manage their sites better, a smart meter will help.
There are also political drivers which vary country to country, such as incentives to develop ‘green’ branding in Germany, and larger companies are also obliged to report and be more accountable on energy and carbon consumption.
In addition, smart meters can drive efficiency savings across a tower owner’s equipment and track how well their site is performing.
Multiple levels of cost savings
Participants talked about how the focus to date in Europe has been mainly on the active equipment but increasingly systems which can monitor site power consumption and report back are enabling savings to be made, however only a very small percentage of that data is currently being used effectively. There aren’t just cost savings to be made from power but also in reducing the number of visits to a site and managing the operational costs.
In more developed markets you can get deep data directly from an energy provider or meter operator, but the group agreed that it was possible to add a proprietary smart meter next to the fiscal meter in order to track this information; for example some power companies don’t like to share detailed information, so adding another meter downstream can provide detail that otherwise may be difficult to obtain.
Using the data effectively
Once a meter is installed it can be used to assess the efficiency of sites; the data can give very accurate information on how the site is performing and can be teamed with IoT technology to manage it further. Once a tower owner starts to get that stream of data it’s possible to move from reactionary maintenance to predicting and mitigating problems before they occur. In developed nations it’s also possible to go beyond measuring to controlling and using the battery banks to balance power and reduce costs. This is also important information to have in order to check bills and ensure that the towers are on the right tariff.
The participants discussed the obstacles which would stop smart metering from working as effectively as they would like. Issues which may arise included sabotage from workers or accidental damage, as well as the possibility of not being able to provide internet ports on sites. However the biggest challenge is buy in; the cost of a meter, of RMS, SIM cards and software all adds up and unless there are some clear incentives, this technology won’t take off very fast. Organisations can find it hard to accept the business case for such a large spend, particularly as metering services don’t bring savings by themselves; it’s what you do with the data which makes the difference.
KPIs and making the business case
The participants agreed that building the metering business case is very hard, as smart metering will identify 12-15% worth of savings but it’s only realistic to realise 5% of the low hanging fruit because the rest will require significant capital investment or a step change in process to bring about.
When setting KPIs across smart metered sites, the group discussed the fact that different sites need their own KPIs and you can’t compare apples and oranges in different countries. There has to be a willingness to read the data in different ways and interpret it against individual needs. It was suggested that KPIs can be set per site, and as long as improvement is shown on that site, it’s a better indicator of performance than comparing sites in countries with differing environments and needs.
One participant said that data management is about viewing by exception. When reading the data it’s important to look at the probability of a failure occurring and work out what the penalty is for that failure occurring, monitoring the right cost with the right reliability.
