# The Role of Smart Meters in Enabling Real-Time Energy Services for Households: The Italian Case
## 2 Smart Meter Overview
### A Review of Energy Metering Deployment Strategies  
According to European directive 2009/72/CE [20], all EU Member States are required to make a cost/benefit analysis (CBA) for introducing smart meters on a large scale, in order to have an economic assessment of all the long-term costs and benefits to the DSO, market players (like suppliers and aggregators), and the individual consumer. Where roll-out of SMs is assessed positively, Directive 2009/72/CE requires that at least 80% of consumers be equipped with intelligent metering systems by 2020. The European Commission has accompanied this Europe-wide huge process with many initiatives, among which is Recommendation 2012/148/EU [21], the publication of a state-of-progress benchmarking report and issuing a mandate for smart metering standardization to the three European Standardization Organizations: the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electro technical Standardization (CENELEC), both based in Brussels (Belgium), and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), based in Sophia Antipolis (France). Recommendation 2012/148/EU indicates 10 functional requirements that are intended to be of common interest for all Member States; however, the details of the roll-out strategies on technical and regulatory criteria are defined independently by each Member State. In most of the countries where SMs have already been installed or are going to be, the benchmarking report [22] shows that smart metering requirements satisfy a common set of functionalities such as: fine granularity of metering data, remote reading and AMM installation with bi-directional communications for DSOs, ToU pricing schemes, cryptographic techniques for preserving privacy, tamper-proof hardware, and the capability of providing readings directly to the user or an authorized third party [21]. Currently, a few Member States have already completed the roll-out (like Italy, Sweden, and Finland), some are in progress (like The Netherlands, Spain, and Poland) and most of the others have plans for a total of about 200 million smart metering units by 2020. By that date, it is expected that around 72% of European electricity customers will have a SM installed at their premises, which will potentially lead, according to benefit assessments in positive CBAs, to average energy consumption reductions of up to 5% and peak load shifting up to 9.9%. Only a few Member States (among which are Germany, Belgium, and Cyprus) will not proceed with a wide-scale substitution [22]. In terms of non-validated, real-time metering data provision to final customers, in some countries DSOs are testing new solutions and technologies: for instance, the utility NRGi (Aarhus N, Denmark) in Denmark installed around 200,000 SM with a HAN interface for IHDs allowing energy awareness. It also includes an M-Bus interface, which allows non-electric SM (e.g., gas or water) to communicate, transforming the electric SM into a data collector [23]. In Poland, Energa Operator SA is supplying SMs with USB-like solutions for HAN interfaces plus a wired/wireless bus for letting third-party devices collect customers' metering data and reply with saving advice. The Swedish company Sundsvall Elnat AB is trying to install a SM with a simple display at the customer's premises. In France, a first lot of 300,000 SMs installed by Enedis Operator (Paris, France) will communicate to IHDs thanks to a Zigbee or KNX interface [24]. Zigbee technology is also used by the Brazilian utility EDP Bandeirante, which integrates their SMs with a serial port and a web portal accessible for consumers. Dutch companies are equipping their SMs with physical ports (e.g., RS-232 or RJ-11) for real-time data reading.