Utilities To Spend $10.1 Billion in Metering Infrastructure Analytics and Integration Services: GTM Research

GTM Research has released a new report   “Utility AMI Analytics at the Grid Edge: Strategies, Markets and Forecasts”. The report projects that utilities around the globe will spend USD 10.1 billion on AMI analytics solutions and integrations services through 2021.

By enhancing the value of new and existing automated metering infrastructure (AMI) investments, utilities are improving customer service and engagement, upgrading grid planning and management, and increasing energy efficiency says the report.
According to GTM Research regulatory mandates and the emergence of revenue opportunities associated with distributed energy resources (DER) are merging to reinvigorate demand for AMI and AMI analytics. The report states that development and implementation of new use cases beyond the initial meter-to-cash use case will continue to be especially critical to the growth of AMI analytics markets.

AMI-based grid edge analytics use cases can be segmented into two markets: network and customer. On the network side, data can be leveraged to better operate and maintain a stable grid through greater voltage control, predictive outage analytics, and the operations and management of assets on the distribution grid. On the customer side, granular AMI data serves to increase the accuracy of algorithms to feed into revenue assurance applications, energy efficiency programs and the maintenance of the meter at the customer site.

Common AMI Architectures: Headend – Meter Data Management Integration

Aakriti Gupta, Grid Research Analyst and one of the report’s author in a statement said “although these use cases could be a major advantage to utilities and are a strong incentive to adopt AMI analytics, vendors still need to form the business case in larger markets,” she added “Today, the majority of utilities deploy standalone solutions with point-to-point integrations to serve niche use cases leveraging existing vendor engagements. The integration gap continues to widen over time as custom code is written for each point-to-point interface, increasing the total cost of ownership with each integration. We predict that the strongest demand in the analytics market will be for turnkey solutions that can be rapidly integrated with existing back-end IT systems with limited customization.”

Beside addressing the challenges and opportunities for AMI analytics growth, the report answers the questions like -How does the progression of the AMI Analytics market break down? What are the technical aspects of specific use cases for customer and network analytics? How do the regional markets differ? And what are the regulatory and market drivers in each region? What is projected growth of the AMI and associated AMI analytics market over the next five years? And What can be learned from recent implementations?.