Intelligent integral advanced metering infrastructure — iAMI

Advanced Metering Infrastructure, AMI, has been adopted by several countries as an important first step towards the development of Smart Grids. AMI normally has a focal point on the boundary between the utility and the end consumer and thus has as the important function to allow the demand to become active based on the extended information that will be available for both the utility and the end customer. On the other side, the large volumes of energy flows for instance at generation delivery points are being metered with other systems and normally at lower periodicities than those implemented for most of the AMI projects developed now a days. The above is considered contradictory since smaller volumes of data will be measured at higher periodicities while larger ones will be available with fewer granularities and at slower data collection rates. This paper presents the concept of integrating the entire set of electric energy meters in an integral concept allowing the implementation of functions that may use energy data for operation and for other purposes such as energy balances. This integration will also take care of providing the utilities the observability of the energy stored at different voltage levels, storage that will play a fundamental role in the future Smart Grids.