Charles Brett, C3B Consulting

One of the areas I have been working on is the systems required to
support meter automation96 from the consumer through many shades
of distribution network (and others) through to the relevant
utilities/generators (both electricity and gas, and potentially
water).  With governments mandating varying levels of granularity
(frequency of reading, from hourly to by the minute or even more
often) and large numbers of potential meters (over 20 million in a
country like Spain), there will be a very large amounts of event
data to be processed before this can be used to manage (hopefully
reduce) energy consumption and contribute to reductions in global
warming.  This is not just a utility challenge.  If consumers are
to do their, they need relevant and usable information as well. The
solution is a whole, not a collection of parts.