Digimondo study on the maturity of IoT applications in the energy industry
Digimondo GmbH conducted an extensive customer survey to determine where municipal utilities and energy providers stand today in the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The pleasing result: 79% of the municipal utilities that rely on the Digimondo platform niotix are already in the IoT rollout or are planning it. The companies have identified at least one use case with high added value and are successively rolling it out. Remote meter reading and infrastructure monitoring for electricity, water and district heating networks are the focus here. But the Smart City field is also already strongly represented due to its immense number of use cases.
Around a third of all use cases are in the area of energy and infrastructure monitoring. The highest level of maturity is in district heating, where just under a third of respondents are already rolling out or planning to do so. In the water and electricity network, too, many IoT use cases are already being implemented or are about to be implemented (approx. 20%). In the area of energy and infrastructure monitoring, monitoring of local and district heating stations and remote meter reading dominate. This is largely due to the fact that the Ordinance on Consumption Metering and Billing for the Supply of District Heating or District Cooling (FFVAV) puts municipal utilities under pressure to act. On the other hand, LoRaWAN offers a cost-effective way to fulfill these obligations.
Multiple IoT use cases in the smart city
A second set of topics with strong application frequency is Smart City. With 40% of all possible use cases in niotix, there are diverse opportunities here for municipal utilities and EVUs to improve the quality of life in their region. Examples include intelligent parking space monitoring, waste container fill level monitoring, green space monitoring or heavy rain prevention. But exotic use cases such as IoT-based monument protection or customer satisfaction evaluation in public facilities are also included.
In addition to the implementation of the FFVAV, the top use cases in the IoT rollout include water level monitoring, parking space monitoring, the reading of shaft water meters, submetering in the power grid, and the monitoring of local and district heating stations. The high proportion of planned and realized rollouts shows that these use cases have a particularly high added value for municipal utilities - be it through possible cost savings, quality improvement of the networks or compliance with legal requirements. IoT-based CO2 monitoring in buildings is also already common practice among many users as a result of the Corona pandemic.
"IoT has arrived in practice!"
Dr. Dennis Kolberg, Chief Product Officer at Digimondo and responsible for the study, sums up: "IoT has arrived in practice! Especially in remote meter reading and infrastructure monitoring for electricity, water and district heating networks, there is obviously attractive added value potential. The maturity of IoT projects in these areas is correspondingly high. On the other hand, the results of the survey show that Digimondo, with its niotix IoT platform, has a tailor-made answer to the challenges facing the energy industry."
