Utilities - ECBM

Public Utilities

Power, water, gas and heat – without them we are lost but still we take them for granted.

However, regulation, cross-regional comparability and a changing behavior of customers push margins down continuously. Digitalization and networking offer new opportunities for providers concerning business models and marketing as well as operations and efficiency. This enables not only new revenue streams, but also the possibility for great cost reductions.

Selected Issues

Advancing Smart City

Smart cities use networking, data and (artificial) intelligence to get more efficient, technological advanced, greener and socially inclusive, which makes them more attractive for residents and companies. Big topics for Smart Cities are for example(e-) Mobility Energy efficiency and management, Environmental protection, resource preservation and security.Public utilities play a major role in making a city intelligent. From the intelligence of their own networks to the operation of data networks and open data platforms, they can be the engine of a smart city.

LoRaWAN - your own Network

As a public utility company you know how to operate networks and you have many tall buildings. These are ideal conditions for building and operating your own data networks. LoRaWAN is a technology that allows you to do this. Its advantages are that it requires very little electricity, achieves very long ranges and gets through thick walls and layers of soil well. This makes it ideal for monitoring underground networks or remote buildings. But it can also be used for smart city applications such as disposal, drainage, lighting or public transport.

Water Meter

Water meters are often in badly accessible places in the shaft. Reading them requires the installation of a construction site, and manual reading is faulty. Remote reading, e.g. via LoRaWAN, can reduce costs, improve quality and significantly increase the frequency of readings. Industrial customers in particular are very interested in granular consumption data, which can be made available as a service, independently of billing.

Remote Monitoring and Maintenance

Unscheduled downtimes of technical equipment and technician trips for inspection and repair cause high costs for utility companies. These costs can be drastically reduced by equipping the plants with sensors, networking and intelligent data analysis. Networked devices permanently report their most important parameters and can be switched off automatically when leaving tolerance ranges. At the same time, all device data is available to all technicians so that remote maintenance and malfunction correction is possible in the majority of cases - or the technician knows the problem and can bring along all necessary spare parts.