There are 13 million of residential customers for Taipower. Only 0.08% of them, that is 10K customers, use smart meters which is called AMI (advanced metering infrastructure). The penetration rate is far behind USA(30%), Japan (15%) and Korea (11%), but it is not far away from Germany (4%) and France (1./4%).
Compared to high power meter (industrial use), the residential usage is around 40% of total usage. Taipower seems not so caring about the power management. As there is no internal performance tracking, there will be no management tools needed.
In September 2016, the new government claims to liberalize the electricity industry and requires Taipower to install 3 million residential smart meters by 2024 (within 8 year time span.)
What make Taipower hesitate to invest AMI? The initial cost is the key point.
The average cost for an employee to record the grid number is NT$5 per month. It will happen every other month. So the annual cost is NT 390 million.
It will need NT 80 billion for the devices, and additional cost for the management platform.
On the other hand, the lower electricity rate for Taiwanese residents. The smart meter will not save too much cost for them. It is impossible to ask them to pay for the smart meters and communication cost.
So, will the government subsidize the smart meters for residents? Will every resident pay for it? Or will Taipower allocate the cost to the monthly fee and ask residents to share the cost of smart meters? Besides, how about raising the electricity price? If the electricity becomes more expensive and then residents care about the saving effect, perhaps the smart meters are easier for adoption.
Could the government and Taipower jump out of the thinking of ROI / cost effectiveness analysis for smart metering? Referring to Chinese companies and google, they like to invest the smart meters into the residential house and then collect big data. Their intention is to leverage the big data analysis to build new business model. Is it possible for the government or Taipower to create more value after subsidize the smart meters?
數位時代有幾篇報導, 可以參考:
https://www.bnext.com.tw/article/40108/BN-2016-07-04-101436-40
另一篇
https://www.bnext.com.tw/article/40124/BN-2016-07-05-123432-40
