Where Are All the Meter Manufacturers in Transactive Energy Projects?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself recently. The answer seems to be "nowhere." In the 110 or so trials of utility industry-related blockchain and transactive energy (TE) Guidehouse Insights has identified, meter vendors are at best the silent, invisible partners of other companies. When asking leading blockchain and TE startups about the meter hardware in their trials, the stock response has been “nothing is available that supports our requirements, so we built our own.” So, why aren’t meter vendors making more noise about a potentially significant growth opportunity?

Blockchain is the hottest, most hyped technology in the energy industry, and TE is its hottest use case. If current TE trials prove successful, I expect rapid adoption, particularly in countries with high penetration of solar, supported by ratepayer-funded incentive mechanisms. TE’s market-based incentives could replace subsidies. Large-scale, fully automated TE platforms have a number of requirements, as discussed in Guidehouse Insights' Blockchain for Transactive Energy Platforms report:

• TE pricing requires visibility into local network conditions, including network assets and distributed energy resources.
• Smart contracts—which determine when transactions are opened and closed—must be hosted locally and fed with market data.
• Meters measure and record all TE power supplied and consumed.
• Communication networks will transport data to interested parties.
• Transactions must be recorded to the blockchain.
• Significant distributed compute power will support automation of the TE platform.

Meter Vendors Can Support Many TE Functional Requirements

TE markets will have to be settled in much the same way as wholesale power markets are today, in accordance with strict market regulations and technology standards. This is a complex system, where a lot of trust will be placed on the technology platform. Meter vendors have many capabilities that could put them in a commanding position to lead the TE space:

• Smart meters already provide visibility at the point of consumption.
• Advanced metering infrastructure communications could provide the data networks on which TE runs.
• Smart meter data concentrators could be used as nodes for the blockchain, store smart contracts, provide compute power for localized pricing calculations, and so on.

There is another feature that meter vendors have so far overlooked: it is difficult to amend records already committed to the blockchain. Consequently, it is vital to ensure that transaction data is correct before it is recorded. This will be a difficult task in a largely automated TE platform. While smart meter accuracy is generally high—between 99.5% and 99.9%—a validation algorithm is run regularly to estimate missing or erroneous meter readings. In TE, a similar algorithm must run on transaction data. However, it is likely that validation will be distributed alongside the ledger, rather than a centralized batch process. Most meter vendors also offer a meter data management system with an associated validation algorithm.

Despite meter vendors’ requisite hardware and software, they are nowhere to be seen in the TE world. There are many reasons: ongoing major smart meter rollouts command a lot of attention, and there is little money to be made in TE right now. However, I would have expected at least one vendor to have taken the leap into the world of TE. The biggest risk is that meter vendors are trapped in the old utility world, where metering innovation was driven by utilities—with whom meter vendors have decades-old relationships—and adoption of new metering technologies was slow and incremental.

TE adoption will be different. It is driven by startups that have no previous relationship with meter vendors. These startups could develop their own validation algorithms; they could choose to use public 5G networks for data communications; or they may decide to deploy their own distributed compute. If this happens, meter vendors will miss out on potentially billions of dollars of value created by TE. Meter vendors must wake up to the reality of TE and the opportunities and threats the market presents.