Smart Meters are the spearhead of two major initiatives that are top of the agenda for distribution utilities worldwide, and even more so in India:

• Combatting climate change by introducing Renewables, Electric Vehicles and Demand Side Management. Introducing these technologies implies that utilities deploy smart meters to report real-time consumption data in order to meet grid stability.
• Ensuring financial resilience of the utility by reducing revenue leakages. The current covid scenario clearly demonstrates the drawback of relying on manually reading meters to generate bills.

While smart meters are the perfect answer to reach above objectives, they introduce:

• Crucial security issues – from privacy breach to state-sponsored cyber-attacks, and
• 24/7 reliable connectivity requirements

Additionally, smart meters are long-life assets that require regular updates of firmware, security credentials or mobile operator – while ensuring a contained total-cost-of-ownership (TCO). Smart meters being deployed in millions, any obstacle in ensuring security and long-life resilience, in a remote mode, can snowball into mammoth issue and costs.

To operate efficiently, Utilities must ensure an appropriate smart meter design, together with lifecycle management systems in place to detect and address potential security and connectivity issues - before they wipe out the high expected RoI.

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Smart meter manufacturers who can prove their devices are safe and reliable, yet operating at optimised TCO, will gain Utilities´ trust – and become preferred partners for decades to come.

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There are 3 key steps that should be considered to ensure that smart meter roll-outs meet requested expectations:

       1. USE FUTURE-PROOF CELLULAR CONNECTIVITY

• Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) solutions such as LTE Cat.1, LTE Cat.M and Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT) are best suited networks for smart metering.While NB-IoT is ideal for long-life battery-constrained devices, Cat.M and Cat.1 networks are often used for electricity metering in Europe and the US where the amount of data exchanged is expected to increase beyond the capacity that NB-IoT networks could handle.
• Plan for the use of eSIMs: these are ideal to ensure single SKU, 24/7 network coverage and contractual flexibility during a meter´s life. In vast countries like India, with multiple DISCOMs and mobile operators, logistics drive up costs and complexity that eSIMs can tremendously reduce.

       2. PLAN FOR REMOTE & SECURE SMART METERS MANAGEMENT

• Utilities companies require long-lasting solutions which will be reliable for extended periods of time and will meet designated Service Level Agreements (SLA).

 

• Device lifecycle management solutions enable over-the-air issues detection, as well as wide-scale troubleshooting and updates, whenever needed. Digital signature schemes ensure these remote activities are operated securely, preventing against malware. 

      3. SECURE YOUR SMART METERS - AND HENCE THE GRID

• Utilities need to be extremely sensitive to the cybersecurity risks involved in smart meter deployments.  

 

• Think of security holistically – from the meter to the Head End System (HES) and beyond. This will ensure that smart meters cannot be used by enemy hackers to bring down the national grid of India, as it´s been proven that just 7-15% of hacked smart meters could bring down a country´s grid.
• Use security products and Key Management Systems specifically designed for smart energy protocols, logistics flows and lifecycles to provide:
• Secure digital identity and out-of-the-box encryption keys, embedded into the roots of each device. That ensures that devices cannot be cloned and wider networks are protected, even in the unlikely scenario that an individual device gets breached.
• Mutual authentication of energy actors and state-of-the-art encryption for data integrity and confidentiality. Use standard-based DLMS 0 and DLMS 1 protocols.
• Ability to rotate meters´ keys and credentials over the air, both for single meters or massive fleets. This security best practice mitigates the risk that hackers decipher keys over long periods.
• A Key Management System independent of meter type and HES, and that can work across multiple HES. This will ensure that your system is completely inter-operable, yet secure.

Thales is at the forefront of IoT for mission-critical and privacy-sensitive infrastructure such as ‘smart grid’. Millions of smart meters worldwide are connected and secured with Thales technology .Thales’ leading expertise in connectivity (eSIM, cellular modules) and cybersecurity (Trusted Key Manager) offer highly resilient, scalable and secure smart meter solutions to Utilities and smart meter vendors in India.