South Africa and the Southern African region’s electricity sector is rapidly evolving, driven by factors including decentralisation, digitalisation and sustainability, and while this does present challenges, there is an opportunity to use technology and other solutions to manage this.

This was highlighted by speakers during EE Business Intelligence’s webinar: “Technology innovations and solutions for evolving electricity markets in South and Southern Africa”, held on April 2.

Ontec Systems CEO Damian Padachi welcomed efforts in recent years to improve the supply side of energy management and called for this to continue.

However, he pointed out that there was an opportunity for increased focus and improvements on the demand side and proffered smart meters as one technology option in this regard.

Padachi said smart meters could be used to balance the available supply with demand needs of consumers, both dynamically and proportionate to the consumption of users.

While smart meters are not new, he said their standard benefits had been reached and that there was an opportunity to improve these and fine-tune them for more specific uses, with these new functions and features enabled by improvements in telecommunications.

New features include, among others, multi stages demand management in a meter.

The ability to do targeted disconnection would engender the practical benefit of allowing areas such as hospitals and emergency services to be excluded from loadshedding, with the meter being linked to a specific location.

There is also the option of calendar features to pre-programme load management depending on loadshedding schedules.

Also, switching on post loadshedding, or outages,can be done in a staggered manner, to ensure a controlled comeback load which prevents damage to infrastructure or causing another outage.

Moreover, Padachi said the data insights gleaned from the smart meter could be used for more targeted load management when required. Utilities would be able to undertake demand response in a more efficient and less disruptive manner, based on their behavioural patterns.

It was acknowledged that more needs to be done to incentivise people to adopt such solutions, to ensure they also benefit from allowing utilities to access their information.