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The IT architecture for meter reading and utility services is at the core of new business models and has a decisive role as an enabler for resource efficiency measures. The communication architecture used by those services has significant impact on cost, flexibility and speed of new service rollout. This article describes how the dominant system model for meter reading came about, what alternative models exist, and what trade-offs those models have for rollout of new services by different stakeholders. Control of a self learning home automation system by dynamic tariff information (Real-Time-Pricing) is given as an application example. 1 HISTORY OF THE UTILITY CENTRIC ICT ARCHITECTURE FOR SMART METERING Technology advances in the last 50 years as well as decreasing prices for integrated circuits and communication have driven the move from mechanical towards electronic meters, from manual to automated reading, and from annual or monthly readings towards more frequent readings, e. g. in a 15 minute period. The interesting aspect here is the approach taken to implement these straightforward developments – either as a dedicated system solution for a specific problem or as a generic infrastructure serving multiple purposes with similar demands. Such demands are: • Ubiquity – meters can be almost anywhere in an area served by electric energy and other metered services. • Medium reliability – a system with extreme geographic distribution may not be dependent on the availability of a single element or communication branch. • Cost efficiency – low communication cost per application using the ICT infrastructure. It is desirable when nodes and communication do not incur a fixed monthly cost or cost per transferred byte, because a fixed monthly cost per element may break many business cases and a fixed cost of data may render cost estimates unpredictable. As an example, assume you calculated the communication cost based on the small amount of meter data to be transferred and are confronted with several firmware upgrades of meters which involve a significantly higher data transfer volume. In the beginning, generic use of the smart metering infrastructure was in focus. Theodore Paraskevakos, one of the frontrunners of automatic meter reading, applied his invention of Caller ID transmission in telecommunications to fields as diverse as meter reading (Paraskevakos and Bushman, 1980), sensor communication – at the heart of today’s Internet of Things (IoT) –, the transmission of video rentals and other applications. With technology progress, the dedicated optimization of systems for the readout of billions of meters got more attention. Potential customers for such systems – sales or distribution units of utilities, or dedicated meter reading service providers – usually have no business in providing communication services for elements outside their meter and distribution control infrastructure. Instead, they are interested in a complete fulfillment of their customer-side tasks by a single infrastructure: • Automated meter reading at defined times and transmission of the reading data to a data center, • Software update for all elements of the meter infrastructure, such as the meters themselves, conGoeller, T., Wenninger, M. and Schmidt, J. Towards Cost-Effective Utility Business Models. DOI: 10.5220/0006759202310237 In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems (SMARTGREENS 2018), pages 231-237 ISBN: 978-989-758-292-9 Copyright c © 2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved 231

Towards Cost-Effective Utility Business Models - Selecting a Communication Architecture for the Rollout of New Smart Energy Services