Johannesburg - A R600 million project to build two Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) hardware mass production plants and thirteen distribution satellite warehouses will be rolled out across the country.
The project will be administered and managed by Madinda Utilities, a Pretoria-based AMI hardware manufacturer and utilities diagnostics specialist company, which has over 25 years of industrial experience in utilities cost optimisation, diagnostics, sustainable renewable energy resource hardware distribution, installations, and administration.
The company pledged the investment at the South African Investment Conference earlier this year.
According to the Managing Director, Ogi Madinda, the purpose of the project is to roll out advanced metering infrastructure nationally.
He said the end product consists of tamper-proof, state-of-the-art electronic and digital hardware and software that combine interval data measurement with continuously available remote communications.
‘’The system is the quintessential full measurement and collection system that includes metres at the customer site, communication networks between the consumer and their distributor, such as an electric or water utility or distributor, and data reception and management systems that make the information available to both consumers and suppliers,’’ said Madinda.
He adds that the system will allow consumers to receive real-time energy pricing and offers from the utility to manage their metres. This will enable consumers to benefit from lower bills, while utilities will benefit from a stable load on the grid and less need to invest in expensive new capacity.
Madinda said that this was a turnkey solution for efficiency in the energy sector in South Africa.
He added that the project would enable South Africa to manufacture its own smart-grid hardware, which is currently designated for local manufacturing and content and only available through importation, solve a national utilities distribution problem, and enable the country to join the global supply chain in this sector by establishing its own mass production plant for DLMS/COSEM-compliant AMI hardware.
‘’Ultimately, it will prevent outages, massive revenue collection losses, and excessive load shedding with the following long-term benefits: utilities diagnostics integrity, distribution assets security and longevity, revenue collection protection and enhancement, increase in operational efficiency and performance, enhancement of customer service, demand response, demand-side management including outage detection and service restoration, enablement of customer engagement, and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,’’ he said.
According to Madinda, the project will effectively revive the revenue collection systems of municipal distributors to profitability and liquidity; conduct continental hardware calibration and security compliance for the TID Rollover Deadline; increase job opportunities, skills transfer, and defuse poverty; and achieve utility distribution efficiencies for 186 municipalities and small-scale embedded generation interconnection projects that will improve their category grading, rendering municipalities equitable, profitable, and sustainable to their constituencies, allowing even the smaller municipalities to benefit from the South African Municipal Bond Market.
The Star