Metering is at the “heart” of the energy transition, says IoT maker EDMI

EDMI, owned by Osaki Electric Company in Japan, has major smart metering deals with water, gas, and electric utilities in Asia and Europe. The Singapore-based company makes IoT modules for utilities, to provide the management platform for smart meter devices, connectivity, and data.

EDMI struck a deal with UK-based chip design and IoT company Arm back in March, to integrate latter’s Pelion IoT software platform and Mbed device operating system into its offer to utility providers. The pair share at least one major utility customer in Europe.

The partnership with Arm will enable utilities to secure, simplify and accelerate the deployment of connected smart meters and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solutions. Utilities taking EDMI meters will be able to use the Arm platform to identify and address outages, detect power thefts, track usage patterns, and plan asset upgrades and maintenance schedules.

EDMI, also part of the US based uCIFI Alliance, along with connectivity provider Kerlink and lighting company Schréder, among others, told Enterprise IoT Insights, for a recent Making Industry Smarter editorial report on the energy and power sector (see Keeping the Lights on with Green Power) its solutions are at the “heart” of the energy transition, and gave a number of examples of its work.

Here is the interview with Andrew Thomas, chief marketing officer at EDMI, in full.

How is EDMI innovating with smart meters and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)?

“EDMI is engaged in a range of innovation projects using our AMI and smart meter technology. AMI solutions including the EDMI Energy Cloud are being tightly integrated to enable innovative new energy infrastructure.

“This is for fast control in electric vehicle charging facilities, high speed measurement and switching in virtual power plant and distributed energy management projects, ans also for loss management in high theft and technical loss networks.

“EDMI is innovating its products through predictive safety algorithms both on the smart meters themselves and through machine learning in the back end. These initiatives identify wiring and installation issues which could lead to safety incidents, provide real-time alarming in the event of fire, and identify tamper events leading to an unsafe meter installation.”

What are the biggest challenges for smart utilities?

“The biggest challenges faced are the move from traditional centralised power generation (coal, nuclear, fossil fuel) to more decentralised renewable sources, and the increase in the size and demand of loads owned by traditional residential customers, with electric behicles and batteries.

“With this change comes a range of different challenges associated with security of supply, balancing of load and generation on the network in more localised ways and challenges with the overall quality of power being supplied on the network.”

How is technology helping overcome these challenges?

“EDMI is at the heart of solutions to this challenge. EDMI is engaged in metering, monitoring and control of newly connected infrastructure such as micro-solar generation, battery storage and electric vehicle charging stations.

“Due to the rich firmware capabilities of our smart meters and the capability of our energy cloud machine learning, EDMI solutions are able to assist in the real-time monitoring and control of the new sinks and sources of energy.”

Can you give examples of your work to transform the energy market, with detail of the impacts?

“EDMI has worked with one energy retailer in Australia to significantly reduce the demand at peak times where spot prices in Australia have risen thousands of times higher than the typical price through intelligent load shifting based on the spot market pricing and local network conditions.

“We are working with a number of partners to trial ancillary services in the energy market through the monitoring of demand and power quality on the network and controlling localised batteries to deliver fast demand response to replace the use of spinning reserve and large scale industrial demand response solutions.

“We also have a number of partners globally in trials to deliver new peer to peer trading mechanisms to enable customers with solar generation to generate faster return on investment for their panels through selling of energy to other customers in the market, who in return are able to buy power at a discounted rate to that provided by conventional energy suppliers.”