Spain’s biggest utility, Endesa, is moving fast with smart metering — with a plan to install 13 million smart meters by 2015.

At this year’s Metering in Europe conference, Endesa Smart Metering Engineer Maria Jose Gonzalez noted in a presentation that Endesa intends to be the first Spanish utility to complete installation of smart meters for all customers under 15 kW. This includes all residential customers and most small commercial customers.

More about Endesa’s rollout…

By Alicia Carrasco, eMeter Director for EMEA Regulatory Affairs

Endesa began installing smart meters in June, and plans to have installed 150,000 by the end of 2010 — with 100% rollout by 2015.

The utility will centralize smart meter reading in one location, which is projected to handle each year:

• 156 million readings per month
• 1 million consumer connections and disconnections
• 1.2 million outages and power reconnection events
• Half a million voltage changes
• 2 million switches to new power retailers

Endesa is following the example of its parent company, the Italian utility Enel, by pioneering smart meter deployment in its country. Endesa also is using the same metering protocol and architecture as Enel.

While Endesa did not meet the government’s intermediate targets, eMeter expects smart metering to ramp up in Spain after this push from Endesa.

Coming next in Spain: Consumers would benefit from applications (such as eMeter’s Energy Engage) that will help them manage data, and monitor and control their energy use. This will be most useful once appropriate incentives and tariffs are in place, so Spanish consumers can respond to different prices at different times of day and reduce peak demands.

Meanwhile, in Italy, lack of consumer engagement software, next-day and real-time energy information feedback, and dynamic pricing have been delaying the full realization of consumer benefits from smart metering.