Traditional Vs Smart Electricity Metering Systems: A Brief Overview

Electricity meters are devices for electricity consumption measurements, which have been used and are still in use today with modern technologies. In some places, traditional electricity meters are replaced with smart electricity meters for more accuracy, efficiency, features, privacy, security and visibility in electricity measurements. Literature review was used in this study to compare traditional analogue electricity meters with digital electricity meters. Therefore, the achievements and challenges of 12 countries around the world (2 countries on each continent except Antarctic), which adopted smart electricity metering solutions, were also explored. The paper considered consumers electricity meters and not power grid meters. It was shown that deploying smart metering solutions improve grid reliability, enhance revenue management, reduce electricity losses, address billing and credit control difficulties, promote energy efficiency, improve services to customers, postpone construction of new power generation plants, reduce power theft and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  However, smart electricity metering solutions are not adopted worldwide because of: ageing and outdated infrastructures, inadequate resources, lack of integrated communication platforms, cost of deployment, transition from legacy systems, management of the vast amounts of data, compatibility of elder equipment, lack of standards and interoperability and changes in regulatory protocols and policies. Keywords: Traditional metering, Smart metering, Smart electricity meters, smart grid, Traditional electricity meter

THE CONCEPT FOR THE “SMART HOME” CONTROLLED BY A SMARTWATCH

In this paper a “Smart Home“ solution is proposed in which power plugs in a remote room can be controlled by a smartwatch, an Android mobile device or a PHP web app. Communication between these devices takes place in real time via server using Node.js technology. An electrical circuit for determining current and voltage on the plugs via Arduino Wi-Fi module sends the measured values to the server, based on which the electrical energy consumption in each time interval can be determined. All the measured values are stored in MySQL database and used for creation of appropriate reports. Smartwatch app enables remote plugging and unplugging. In addition, the setting of limits for electrical energy consumption on each plug is enabled, as well as the power of the consumption device that can be plugged. Exceeding of the allowed values leads to the automatic unplugging