The Role of Smart Meters in Enabling Real-Time Energy Services for Households: The Italian Case

The Smart Meter (SM) is an essential tool for successful balancing the demand-offer energy curve. It allows the linking of the consumption and production measurements with the time information and the customer's identity, enabling the substitution of flat-price billing with smarter solutions, such as Time-of-Use or Real-Time Pricing. In addition to sending data to the energy operators for billing and monitoring purposes, Smart Meters must be able to send the same data to customer devices in near-real-time conditions, enabling new services such as instant energy awareness and home automation. In this article, we review the ongoing situation in Europe regarding real-time services for the final customers. Then, we review the architectural and technological options that have been considered for the roll-out phase of the Italian second generation of Smart Meters. Finally, we identify a collection of use cases, along with their functional and performance requirements, and discuss what architectures and communications technologies can meet these requirements.