If you had to design a better energy future for your home now, I suggest that you would treat your meter box as a key part of the infrastructure.
What is often overlooked is that the meter box or switchboard is where you want to centrally control important services so that your family can live a better life in the technological age.
Obviously, for power supply, you would continue to buy some power from the main grid, which is your ultimate backup power source, but most of this power will come from our own rooftop solar system.
If the cost-benefit ratio is superimposed, we may also have a household battery in the garage, and it is very likely that our future car will be electric-a battery on wheels!
But the meter box is not the focus, it is still pushing to install more utility smart meters, even if it admits that they are not “new technology.”
However, in a truly smart energy future, utility meters will be nowhere near the smartest thing in the box.
The task of my smart meter box infrastructure is not only to count the number of electrons, but also to ensure that we will not get an electric shock.
There will be a critical service circuit, so ypu can cost-effectively invest in a small home storage system, and your refrigerators, microwave ovens, NB, Wi-Fi and some strategic lighting can operate normally even when there is a power outage at night.
You would have the most advanced surge protection and voltage optimization to protect expensive and usually sensitive home electronics, especially in the Covid era when work equipment is now at home.
You would also design supply capacity and circuit board space for rooftop solar, battery systems, electric vehicles, etc.
You would have smart switches to remotely control major loads-such as hot water, electric car charging, air conditioning, and pool pumps-whether I turn them on or off, get on and off by myself, or allow a third-party service provider to do this for me (In this case, you would also have an overlay switch).
To facilitate my choice of automation and other services, you would want a reliable Internet uplink that integrates with the home’s electrical infrastructure and data.
Moreover, it is crucial that you would never put all of this under the control of an energy company through its smart meter, which can also be called Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in the industry.
Obviously, this is an over-naming of a twenty-year-old technology that clearly predates the smartphone, which is designed to meet national measurement requirements dating back to 1960 (before decimal currency).
But there will be many technology brands in this field, and the key to this increasingly distributed and communications-dependent infrastructure is to use the latest cloud tools to easily integrate devices and data to achieve seamless interoperability.
Technically speaking, it can be said that utility meters are not required at all. The security data used for billing may be the output of the consumer device in the smart meter box, although it is a big requirement to gain the acceptance of this in the traditional industry.
Now it’s not just our home power infrastructure. Meter boxes are the core lifestyle infrastructure and have a huge impact on our daily operations. They intersect with grid stability, home automation, security, mobility, information and telecommunications technology, financial well-being, and health.
Post time: Dec-03-2021