The technology development of automatic metering and monitoring systems

The rapid development of ICT technology, power metering technology and power monitoring knowledge base has had a very significant impact on AMR and power monitoring in the past few years. Historically power monitoring systems have been either automated meter reading (AMR) or power quality and power usage (PQ) monitoring systems. As the network technology, communication protocols and computing power technology increased the costs have decreased and we are observing a merger of the system capabilities. New AMR systems combine some PQ functions and PQ monitoring systems include AMR functions. These are accomplished with automatic dialup or networked systems with automatic power flow, power usage, Kvar and PF as well as automatic event alarming, long-term data management with trending and automatic report generation. The next generation power monitoring systems include multilevel AMR with PQ monitoring with WIFI connection and intelligent monitoring systems. These intelligent monitoring systems will provide the power usage data for AMR parameters such as PF, KVAR, time of usage and include instantaneous event analysis, automatic event categorization, automatic distant to fault calculation and automatic trending of power all parameters