LV level smart metering spurred by Corinex

VANCOUVER, USA: The University of Cyprus has opened a BPL Competence Centre (as part of its newly established Research Centre for Sustainable Energy) with the support of industry technology player Corinex Communications. The Centre, as added in a press note, is equipped with the latest in Corinex BPL-to-the-meter technology, with facilities for testing and validating BPL communications performance on LV and MV lines and free samples from leading meter vendors.

The Centre now forms part of the University's School of Engineering, with a dedicated staff of over 20 researchers. The Centre is headed by George E. Georghiou, former Fellow at the University of Cambridge and the Chair of Photovoltaic Technology at the University of Cyprus.

BPL technology is stated as hundreds of times faster than any other narrowband powerline technology used for meter data acquisition, yet at nearly the same nominal costs. This high speed capability apparently makes it easy to deploy and apply full AES 56-bit or 128-bit security and also offers endless opportunity for further innovation.

"I believe we are seeing the beginning of a major shift in requirements in metering infrastructure from collecting meter data for billing purposes to load management within the meter cluster. As ever growing proportions of our energy are produced by renewable sources, this management has to be dynamic - almost happening in real-time. This can only be achieved using a very high speed communications technology - BPL," says Professor George E. Georghiou.

"We see utilities expressing interest in automated load management on the LV level. It requires-within minutes-responsive delivery of metered data and supplied energy measurements, including local PV production, to the local Smart Grid concentrator unit. The Corinex concentrator is powerful and fast in communicating with the meters. It is ready to employ sophisticated algorithms to process these data together with data on forecasted weather in order to generate effective responses and issue commands to the meters, such that efficient localized energy load management and/or storage is realized," says Peter Sobotka, CEO of Corinex.

In this commercial cooperation, parties plan to enrich the Corinex BPL concentrator and SmartGrid solution with new algorithms researched and developed by the University, and then validate them with Corinex customers.