Orga Systems to Display 'Smart Home 2.0' Next-Generation Smart Metering Solution

While a number of utility companies across the nation are experimenting with the use of smart metering, allowing consumers to better control how much energy they use and when, many other utilities have not yet gotten their feet wet, despite the demonstrable benefits of smart metering. In addition to saving energy, the use of smart metering technologies allow utilities to be able to better communicate with their customers, billing them in a more flexible and dynamic way.

Paderborn, Germany-based Orga Systems, a company that provides next-generation smart metering technology, plans to put a new solution, its Smart Home 2.0 Demo, on display at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) 2012 from February 27 to March 1 in Barcelona, Spain. The new Smart Home solution can help bring dynamic energy billing for utility services to a new level, says the company in a press release.

Using the solutions, utility providers would be able to offer customers more innovative price plans, real-time cost control and usage information, which can help customers better understand their energy usage and plan around it to their advantage. Orga Systems says it understands the challenges utilities are facing and hopes, with its vendor-agnostic technology, to meet energy companies' needs by enabling them to fulfill their highest performance requirements.

The Smart Home 2.0's configurable billing framework provides end-to-end billing processes for invoicing, payment and collection handling, having the ability to cater for the data volumes that even the largest utilities are expecting from their smart meter deployments. Orga Systems’ (News - Alert) rule-based rating engine can cope with managing dynamic tariffs in real-time and reduce database complexity, which enables the system performance to scale linearly from ten thousands of customers up to more than 150 million, says the company.

What's truly innovative about the solution is that it integrates real-time communication capability, allowing energy use to be tracked down to tiny intervals. This can help customers make better decisions about energy use and enable utilities to become more customer-centric and segment their customers more granularly, so that services and tariffs can be tailored not just to groups of users but even to individuals.

Utility companies can benefit from reduction in peak loads and offer new options for managing high generation costs while increasing customer satisfaction via new service offerings such as prepaid, cost control and budgeting.