By Greentech Lead Team: The market for new installations
of smart grid billing systems will be worth $440 million in 2012, growing to
$1.2 billion in 2016.
Billing systems and customer information systems (CIS)
used by electricity utilities and retailers will change during 2012 to enable
better use to be made of data collected from the smart meters now being
deployed in large numbers around the world, according to a study by Innovation
Observatory.
“While smart meter deployments have been growing steadily
over the last 3-4 years, utilities’ IT system priorities have been focused on
preparing for how to deal with large volumes of smart meter data. This year we
expect to see the emphasis change towards making use of that data to develop
innovative tariffs and new services, including for charging of plug-in hybrid
electric vehicles. All this will require changes to traditional billing systems
and CISs,” said Danny Dicks, author of the report called Smart Grid Billing
Outlook 2012-2016.
The potential for vendors of billing systems developed
initially for telecoms services to win business in the power sector, both from
established utilities and new entrant electricity retailers. Examples of such
contracts include those won by vendors Convergys (with E.ON), LogNet Systems
(with First Utility) and MetraTech (with OnStream).
According to a press release, billing challenges posed by
the smart grid can be addressed in different ways. Utilities and electricity
retailers may go for a big bang change or choose to deploy an adjunct system
for either meter data management (MDM) or billing. The level and nature of
retail competition and the extent of legacy IT infrastructure will influence
the decision that an individual provider will make.