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OUTDATED ELECTRICITY METERING means a comparative lack of efficiency, accuracy, and even grid reliability. This not only places pressure on the bottom line for utilities but directly impacts the everyday lives and budgets of communities and households desperate for stable yet affordable power.
The obvious solution is smart metering and the vast quantity of real-time data it generates. However, a successful transition to smart metering technology in any region can only be achieved by implementing an effective connectivity solution between both utility and meter, and meter and consumer.
The need for smart metering solutions in Africa
In Africa, the urgency to upgrade to smart metering is pronounced. Electricity distribution utility companies, including municipal, metropolitan, and private providers along with smart city projects, off-grid solution providers, and meter manufacturers, are key stakeholders in the continent’s energy transformation. Together they recognize the importance of eliminating manual meter reading to significantly lower operational costs, as well as accurately bill customers, initiate dynamic pricing, monitor grid losses, optimize grid performance and minimize outages.
In turn, there’s a clear understanding that connected metering would benefit consumers by empowering them to proactively manage and optimize their own energy consumption. But smart metering in Africa depends on reliable communication – a reality not easily achieved.
- Read more: Read more: Using IoT to get the most out of smart grids
Dominant metering technologies fail to deliver
The two predominant metering technologies currently used in Africa—power line carrier (PLC) and cellular—are proving ineffective for various reasons, despite being successful elsewhere.
For PLC solutions, pre-paid meters communicate over physical power lines, sending data back to a data concentrator unit (DCU), that in turn sends it to the Cloud. For cellular solutions, each pre-paid meter has a cellular modem that communicates to a cellular base station, with data then backhauled to an energy company’s software platform.
Blackspots can sometimes make cellular coverage less reliable, leading to high subscription fees and low availability of service. And because cellular smart meter subscriptions are cost-optimized, the frequency that data can be transmitted is often limited.
And PLC solutions do not work well in the event of the regular scheduled and unscheduled power outages that plague African networks. When there’s a power outage, it can take a long time for the network to restart and the smart meters to reconnect once power is restored - delaying critical grid management insights and consumer notifications.
Renewable energy sources added to the grid can also negatively affect PLC communications, while consumer devices such as many low-quality electrical appliances generate significant interference, further disrupting smart meter communication.
DECT NR+ solves networking challenges
Given the drawbacks of these established technologies, wireless connectivity standard DECT NR+ (NR+) has emerged as a viable alternative to PLC and Cellular. As well as being designed to operate with the same seamless and secure performance as cellular networks by offering over 99.99 percent uptime reliability, NR+ also provides exceptional resilience against blind spots and interference, thanks in part to its robust physical layer and operation in the less congested 1.9 GHz frequency band.
Using NR+, smart meters extend and strengthen wireless network coverage, thanks to its self healing mesh topology. In urban environments, each smart meter can connect with over 50 neighboring meters, creating multiple access points for reliable communication.
Furthermore, NR+ offers low operational costs with negligible data charges and reduced reliance on telecom operators for communication. A single cellular subscription can be shared across thousands of smart meters in urban areas, while in rural regions, the ratio is lower due to the dispersed housing topology.
While traditional smart meters typically send data overnight or a few times per day, with NR+ data can be transmitted every minute – without a significant increase in cellular subscription fees, thanks to consolidated data transmission over a single high-capacity connection (LTE, Wi-Fi or Ethernet), and to the license-exempt communication over the DECT NR+ band.
A Wirepas DECT NR+ smart metering solution
Innovative companies in the smart metering space are already taking advantage of NR+. South African design and manufacturing firm, Sustainable Energy Technologies (SET), for example, has launched a NR+ based Wirepas RF mesh network smart metering solution deployed on Nordic Semiconductor’s next generation nRF9151 module. The solution was developed for electricity distribution utilities and meter manufacturers to enable Africa’s transition to smart energy solutions, with an initial focus on South Africa and Kenya.
The Wirepas NR+ implementation addresses all of the limitations of PLC and cellular meters, while continuously collecting near real time energy data and enabling two-way network communication for remote meter monitoring.
nRF9151 tailored for NR+ and cellular IoT
Nordic’s nRF9151 low power module is specifically designed for DECT NR+ and cellular IoT applications. Support for Wirepas’ NR+ stack enables massive mesh applications that prioritize reliability, security, long range, and scalability.
When used for DECT NR+, the nRF9151’s high transmit power ensures long-range communication even in areas with weak signal conditions, while its superior receiver sensitivity allows the device to detect weak signals from distant smart meters or network nodes. Its compact footprint (12 by 11 mm) and the open MCU makes it ideal for integration into a single chip Network Interface Card (NIC) inside smart meters.
For Africa, NR+ overcomes previous limitations by ensuring reliable, long-range, and cost-effective connectivity to meet its smart metering demands. Nordic technology and Nordic partners specializing in smart metering are there to support this powerful transformation.
