The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced that a consortium led by Delta Electronics Inc (台達電), Taiwan’s leading manufacturer of switching power supplies, has secured a government subsidy to develop Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) — an intelligent digital household utility metering solution.
Delta, alongside partners Acbel Polytech Inc (康舒科技) and Mid Way Electronics Co (明緯儀電), are among the consortiums that landed the latest grants from the ministry’s Department of Industrial Technology, the statement said.
The AMI project began in the second half of this year and is expected to be commercially ready by the end of next year.
The timeline is in line with Taiwan Power Co’s (台電) master plan, which intends to digitize Taiwan’s analog utility metering systems by 2012.
This would reduce Taipower’s overhead as it would no longer need to send staff out on the streets to record utility usage every month. Under the new system, the process would be digitized and utilities monitored remotely from control centers.
Sources said the research and development figures for the three-party AMI solution would cost more than NT$70 million (US$2.2 million) and the government would shoulder nearly half of the cost.
“The hardest part of the AMI is that we need to read the data from each household without errors. There could be the events of data loss due to changes in voltage or interference from electric waves,” Acbel spokesperson Flora Shiao (蕭秀宇) said.
Site testing is critical in this regard and pilot runs have been held in 300 households in Taipei, and another 100 in Hsinchu, she added.
Acbel is also testing its solution in two sites in China, paving way for a future foray into the Chinese market when the technology is ready, she said.
The three-way AMI project in Taiwan will entail aspects including Taipower’s control center’s ability to stop power supplies to offices during after-work hours, to cut off power supplies remotely if a household fails to pay its bills or to stop supplies to production facilities at certain times on demand, she said.
“This solution is digital, interactive, energy saving and green,” Shiao added.
Meanwhile, the ministry said WiMAX operator VeeTime Corp (威達雲端) has secured a grant to develop the nation’s first intelligent transportation system that will incorporate motion sensors, high-speed mobile networks as well as surveillance cameras on roads to ensure road safety.
Such a system will alert authorities in real time when an accident occurs, and will be able to analyze the causes of accidents and determine the true offender based on images and video captured and transmitted via the high-speed mobile network, the statement said.
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