The following interview is abstracted from an article written by Tim Lohman from Computerworld.

According to Max Roberts industry manager utilities and Infrastructure Industry Solutions Group at SAP Australia (and SGA member) , while countries such as Italy had rolled out smart meters in the millions, Australia had an opportunity to lead smart grid technology in the area of managing and monitoring data travelling through multiple electricity market participants.

“All the smart meters [rolled out in Victoria] will capture energy usage every half hour for each residential customer that will go through to the energy provider distributor then the retail company and they will bill based on that data,” he said.

“When a smart meter is read, the meter data comes in by a participant called a meter data provider – they are tasked with reading that data and send it to the market systems, the network company and the retailer, and that doesn’t happen in any countries at scale like what we are faced with in Australia.

“In the past if a customer wanted to disconnect you had to send a business to business request, it might get done tomorrow or the next day because it’s a manual process,” he said. “Now the vision is that you have a customer who wants to move out on the phone talking to the retailer. The retailer presses a button which sends a business to business request to the network provider to disconnect the customer.

Roberts said that along with lower energy consumption and cost savings, the greater connectivity between power suppliers, network operators and retailers would likely see customers able to change providers with the same ease as mobile phone operators.

“We can get there practically, but there are challenges around the systems sending and receiving messages that quickly across the network then out to the meter and back. No one is really sure how it will operate at such scale.”

Thanks to Computerworld for allowing us to abstract this interview. For the full article see: