Siemens boost Qatar project

For the Qatar General Electricity & Water Corporation (Kahramaa) headquartered in Doha, Siemens Infrastructure & Cities is setting up a turnkey smart metering solution, worth 10 million euros.

With the deployment of the Siemens solution, Kahramaa intends to test - in the context of a smart grid project - how energy demand can be managed during peak load periods, and how the billing process with customers can be improved. The project is scheduled to run in three districts of Doha up to May 2013.

Qatar has developed within only a few decades into a modern state with a high standard of living and consequently rising demand for energy.

The smart metering solution to be supplied and installed by Siemens for one of these projects is based on the meter data management system EnergyIP, which, following the acquisition in December 2011 of the software specialist eMeter in California, now forms part of the Siemens Smart Grid portfolio.

With the help of this meter data management software, large volumes of data from smart meters in the power grid can be efficiently read, processed and submitted for billing. In the Doha project, EnergyIP will be configured for 100,000 metering points.

For this Siemens will install 17,000 smart metres, equipped with consumption data recording modules for electricity and water as well as GPS modules for localising the individual metering points.

The order further includes a modern broadband powerline communication network, via which the core grid elements are connected to an existing fiber optic network for the 66 kilovolt transformer substations in the city area.

To improve the billing process with the energy customers, Siemens will ensure that the Kahramaa IT back-office systems are integrated in the smart metering solution.

Energy-efficient, eco-friendly solutions for setting up intelligent power supply networks (smart grids) are part of Siemens’ Environmental Portfolio.

In fiscal 2011, revenue from the portfolio totalled nearly 30 billion euros, making Siemens one of the world’s largest suppliers of eco-friendly technologies. In the same period, the company’s products and solutions enabled customers to reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 320 million tonnes.