Failure Analysis of Current and Future Electricity Meters and their Components in Relation to the Costs of Ownership

Among other aspects, the reliability of electricity meters is important for securing energy supply and other Smart Grid (SG) functions and services. This paper analyses the reliability of functions and services provided by electricity meters in relation to reliability of individual electricity meters and their components. The increasing reliability requirements lead to higher complexity and manufacturing cost of electricity meter. On the other hand, purchase price pressure may cause increased failure rate of an individual meter, drop in overall reliability of SG environment, and finally can increase operating costs. Thus, Total Cost of smart meter Ownership (TCO) is associated with the failure rate (reliability). While seeking optimal TCO/reliability ratio, a contribution of each individual component to the overall failure rate of an electricity meter was investigated. Expected development of selected components reliability parameters and its influence on failure rate of meter and metering system was also estimated