Abstract
Executive Summary
Overview
The next five to ten years will see extraordinary growth and change in the
world metering market. The meter industry has launched into the most important
technological development since the introduction of the Ferraris induction
meter over a century ago. This development has been brewing for several years
but in the last 12 to 18 months has taken off in a spectacula5r way with a
number of governments, mainly in Europe and Asia mandating the establishment
of smart meter networks. These national metering systems will have two-way
fixed network meters and advanced network systems, offering a multitude of
functionalities.
In 2008, there were 1,698 million electricity meters installed in the world,
and annual demand in 2008 was 133 million meters. This will rise at an
unprecedented annual rate of 6.7% to 172 million meters in 2012.
The value of the market will rise even faster, from € 3.9 billion ($5.7
billion) in 2008, at an annual rate of 15.3% to € 6.9 billion ($8.7
billion) in 2012.
61% of this demand is in Asia, and out of that 39% is in China.
The rate of growth (in units) will be highest in Europe at an average of 13.9%
a year, followed by Asia at 6.5%.
The reason for this extraordinary growth is the surge of decisions by
govemment and utilities to invest in advanced metering, mostly nationally or
in some case in large cities.
This is an acceleration beyond expectations of conversion from electronic
meters, to basic electronic and now to AMI.
In Europe demand of electromechanical meters will fall from 19% of all meters
sold in 2008 to 3% in 2012 and in Asia from 32% to 9%. Demand for and basic
electronic meters will decline from 43% to 11% in Europe and from 48% to 22%
in Asia. In contrast residential AMI meters will escalate from 20% to 79% in
Europe and in Asia from zero to 55% by 2012, mainly in three countries, China,
Korea and Taiwan.
The impetus for these massive installations comes form governments and
utilities. 14 of the projects have been initiated by utilities and will
account for 87 million end points by 2015 and 17 have been initiated by
govemments, accounting for 286 million endpoints in 2015.
ABS has identified 32 countries making large investments in advanced metering,
18 of them in Europe. The installed base of AMI units in these 32 courtiers
will increase from 16.6 million in 2009 to 374 million in 2015. In the
intervening period there will be many more projects. Some of these projects
extend beyond 2015 and the total will reach 373 million.
The first national scheme was Italy, for which the moving force was ENEL, not
the Italian govemment of Ontario, the state govemments of California in the US
and Victoria in Australia.
ERDF of France will deploy of 32 million, Spain will deploy 27 million, the UK
29 million, Netherlands 7.5 million. The UK deployment will also measure gas,
with a total of 49 million meters for both electricity and gas.
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