SAUDIS MOVE TO SMART METERS

SEC installs 60,000 smart meters in pilot project
Jennifer Eagle, December 8, 2010 (Construction Week)

"Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) has received approval to implement 60,000 smart meters in a pilot project…Saad H. Al Mansour, executive vice president, Distribution and Customer Service, SEC…said [Saudi Arabia] was taking a slow approach to the project…SEC wants to add about 30,000 meters to the system every year for the next 10 years to meet demand and in the next year it plans to spend US$80 billion which has been approved by SEC's board of directors.

"There are three phases to the transition of a smart grid in Saudi Arabia; it is currently in Phase 1. Al Mansour said SEC's movement is slow because it wants to be sure before it goes ahead implementing the whole system and it is weary that the weather it has in the Kingdom is very harsh…"

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"The number of pilot projects already deployed in the Kingdom include the Diplomatic Quarter in Riyadh where it has installed 1,300 smart meters…[SEC] is also targeting the industrial centre in Jeddah, Makkah, Meddina and Dammam in 2010 and in 2011 plans to focus on Qassim, Haiel, Asir, and in the future; Al-Kharj, Dawadmin, Jazan, Naiyira, Altaif and others.

"Al Mansour said the difficulties [SEC] faces are the cost of development and implementation, infrastructure, harsh weather, maneovering across Open Platforms and the high humidity which is 100% in temperatures of 45 degrees or more…[T]he biggest challenges it faces are high growth demand in Saudi Arabia, capital-intensive projects, lack of spending reserve and high consumption for residential use…"

Going slow with the Smart Grid is a smart move. (click to enlarge)

[Saad H. Al Mansour, executive vice president, SEC:] "We opened a financial bid to implement 40,000 meters total solution at the end of November and we hope to then add another 20,000 meters…We want to implement the smart grid but we want to be sure first. We have asked to submit a plan to install smart meters for six million customers. Then we have to submit a plan to request changing the existing technology…What we expect is better energy management and conservation, sustainable energy and better demand and supply…"

[Saad H. Al Mansour, executive vice president, SEC:] "…We have a vision to develop and deploy a more reliable, secure, economic, efficient, safe, and environmentally safe system…[Changing] the metres for 6 million customers…[will] improve metre reading accuracy, tamper reporting, outage notification, hourly interval data, daily on-demand reads, time or use tariff (TOU)…It will help us in theft detection, enterprise, data management, real time pricing and it will help us in the future with home automation, remote metre programming."