Endesa : reaches 11 million smart meters installed

• Endesa will end the year with 95% of the meters managed by the company replaced.
• The company's total investment in meter upgrades will amount to €600 million between 2015-2018.

Endesa has achieved a figure of 11 million installed smart meters. It will have replaced 95% of the meters it manages by the end of this year.

In the autonomous communities, the company has already installed 4.5 million smart meters in Andalusia, 3.7 million in Catalonia and 1.1 million in the Canary Islands. 850,000 in Aragon, 600,000 in the Balearic Islands and 250,000 in Extremadura.

Thus, at an installation rate greater than 8,000 meters a day, Endesa will have practically completed the implementation of smart meters for customers with contracted power equal to or less than 15 kW by the end of 2017, all of which must have the new equipment installed before the end of 2018 under current legislation.

With time to spare to finish off the process in 2018, all that will be left by the end of 2017 will be cases where situations are recorded that need the cooperation of the customers to be resolved, principally difficulties in accessing homes or where installations need to be adapted and remodelled.

The investment made by Endesa to complete the remote management and modernisation of its Spanish fleet of meters will total €600 million for the period 2015-2018. This is a key process for the development of smart networks and to adapt to needs arising from new electric uses and services that the company is implementing, from the promotion of electric vehicles to home automation through integration of distributed generation.

Endesa's remote management plan also involves the installation of hubs in transformation centres that collect meter data and forward it to the distributor. The 11 million installed meters are currently linked to over 134,000 hubs, enabling their integration into the system and allowing the client to benefit from the advantages that the new equipment offers right from the start.

These include making changes to the provisions of their contracts such as changes upward or downward in contracted power without a technician needing to come to their houses and in less than 24 hours in most cases, as well as less power losses due to breakdowns, as the remote-control meter makes it possible to locate its origin much more quickly than with the old conventional meters.

What's more, the smart meters make it easy to check hourly consumption, eliminating invoice estimates and providing customers with detailed information so they can improve their energy efficiency and select contracts that are better adapted to their consumption profile, and so capture greater advantages.

Through the website www.endesadistribucion.es, Endesa customers that have remote controlled meters can access their consumption history, known as their 'hourly curve'. This makes it possible to display supply consumption graphically for a given period measured by the hour and download the information into a file.

Endesa manages 264 million pieces of hourly data daily corresponding to the consumption information for 11 million customers that already have remote controlled equipment.

Implementation of smart meters also constitutes a major step in the fight against electricity fraud and improvement in installation security, as this equipment has efficient anti-fraud mechanisms that help to pinpoint possible tampering and provide warnings when both the installation tampered with and neighbouring installations are at risk, and so avoiding the serious danger that it entails.