There’s an old joke about the smart mouthed kid in class who is asked to compose a sentence with the word ‘centimeter’ in it. He replies that his grandmother came to visit last weekend and he was told he had to collect her from the bus station.
”How,” asked the teacher,” does that answer the question I just asked?”
”Well,” said the kid,” I was sent to meet her!”
The only connection that joke and this blog post have in common is that they both contain the words Smart and Meter … it’s a rather tenuous link but it’s the best I could come up with.
The global smart meter market will be worth $18.2B USD by 2019 reflecting a CAGR of 10.2 percent. This includes smart electric, water and gas meters for industrial, commercial and residential applications.
The deployment of smart meters will improve utility services to the consumer but will also help governments reach energy efficiency targets and reduce carbon emissions. This is because smart meters are mostly seen in residential applications and as consumers take advantage of peak time energy savings, the need to switch on fossil fuel plants greatly reduces.
Many European countries are aggressively installing smart meters to adhere to the EU energy directives. The EU expects to replace at least 80 percent of electricity meters with smart meters by 2020. Countries such as Italy, Sweden and France are already leading the way with a rapid deployment of smart meters. Many of the new EU-member states; countries such as Estonia, Poland, and Romania have pledged to meet EU smart metering targets, with Estonia already more than halfway through its meter rollout. The expectation is that by 2025, eight of the 11 EU countries will have completed smart meter deployments and worldwide there could be an installed base of nearly 1.1B smart residential meters.
However it’s been the Americas region which has recently dominated the smart meter market. Electric smart meters were found to be the largest smart meter deployment type, and the residential market has surpassed industrial and commercial demand for smart meters.
ON Semiconductor is well positioned to address the needs of this fast growing market segment with a comprehensive portfolio of connectivity, sensing, power management, processing and protection components for smart meters.