In this podcast Lance Hawkins-Dady, board chairman of the STS Association, talks to ESI Africa Editor-in-Chief Nicolette Pombo-van Zyl about how utilities can modernise their metering systems without a costly rip-and-replace. They also discuss why encryption, key management and operator discipline all matter as much as the technology itself.
Hawkins-Dady pointed out that the STS Association has been around for three decades, which demonstrates it use as the global secure mechanism for transferring information, in this case credit for prepayment metering.
“What we’ve tried to do as an association is look at what is the future trends and how are they evolving into the smart metering and how can we play a part in that so that utilities who have invested in STS don’t have to do a rip and replace.
“So, we are partnering with various open standard organisations that are quite involved in smart metering, like DLMS and making sure that we integrate our specifications and allow utilities to upgrade or to move towards smart in a manageable fashion,” he explained.
Smart metering is evolving amidst a variety of standards competing for attention
Taking a step back, he points out that one of the key challenges in the metering industry is moving from the legacy prepaid system to a smart system because there are many different kind of standards that utilities have to contend with.
“The partnership between the DLMS User association and the STS Association is taking the best of two different worlds.
“STSA governs and is the leader in secure transactions for prepaid and DLMS obviously is the dominant player in data exchange um of information for connected systems. By bringing those two worlds together, you have the ability to still maintain revenue protection and revenue collection through STS, but you’ve also got the benefits of smart metering, you know, data collection, data analytics, remote control of your devices, and you’re bringing all of that together.”
Find out what else he had to say about
- How STS has strengthened encryption and key management for the smart era
- Why cybersecurity is a shared responsibility between utilities and technology providers
- What affordability means for end users during modernisation
- Whether there’s still a place for legacy prepaid infrastructure
