With 64-bit computing power and capacitive touchscreens, such meters are expected to help the nation go green and get ‘smarter’.
In late 2019, 1,450 residents of public housing blocks in a large town were able to participate in a pilot project involving an IoT-enabled smart electricity meter for measuring electricity consumption.
Under the country’s Housing Development Board (HDB)’s Smart Green Homes Initiative, the so-called ‘hyper-smart’ meter was used with a smart home mobile app and three smart plugs with which household electricity consumption could be monitored, and some appliances controlled remotely.
Now, the Singapore Energy Market Authority (EMA) has announced a program to develop and testbed advanced electricity meters running on the Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT). Such meters will be based on the ‘hypersmart’ IoT meters piloted in 2019.
Going green with Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT)
The idea behind the various electricity consumption monitoring and smart-home features being tested is to enable businesses and households in the country to reap greater benefits from the consumption data and network connectivity.
This latest initiative is a collaboration between the EMA, Smart Nation and Digital Government Group (SNDGG) and utilities provider SP Group. The testbed will eventually be rolled out across 1.4 million consumer accounts (mainly households) in Singapore by 2024, as part of the national drive towards digitalization and greater efficiency.
At the heart of the projects is a series of ‘hyper-smarter’ electricity meters produced by Anacle Systems, a supplier of asset and property management and smart utilities management systems founded in Hong Kong. The firm’s IoT-enabled meters offer 40 times more computing power than the closest competitor, and they deploy FeRAM-based persistent memory that is more than six million times more durable than traditional EEPROM-based memory.
The devices also support both Linux and Android operating systems.
