Asian Utility Week

Vice chair and Executive Director attended “Asian Utility Week”, an international conference held in Bangkok.

On May 31 and June 1 Mr. Makoto Watanabec (Vice chair of GSGF and Secretary General of JSCA) and Dr. Ronnie Belmans (Executive Director of GSGF) held speeches at “Asian utility week 2016”, which is a large-scale expo in Asia on the utility industry. Approximately 2,300 experts of energy/smart grid field in Asian countries attended the event held in Bangkok, Thailand to promote GSGF activities through conferences and exhibitions. The conference, exhibitions and networking had a wide variety of themes such as smart meters, distributed energy, AMI, smart cities etc.

On a first day in Keynote Panel, a panel discussion titled “The digital revolution and its impact on utilities and customers – From AMI to Microgrids,” about the possibility of grid digitization was held by Dr. Belmans and representatives of utility from Thailand, Afghanistan, the U.S. and Australia. Whether digitization can be new big chance was discussed. In the discussion, consumers were interested in a comfortable life in the future rather than in introducing smart meters itself, so focusing on consumer demand was important.

On a second day in Innovation keynote, Mr. Watanabe introduced various demonstration projects and their results on smart communities which Japan has implemented in and outside the country titled, “For realization of smart community with innovative technology solutions – digitization for smart homes and cities.” He stated the importance of collaboration with organizations abroad and building networks internationally for the further development of smart communities. He also described that GSGF is aiming to disseminate the smart grid technology, to share the knowledge for addressing energy issues in collaboration with organizations promoting smart grid in each region through the global network, and expand partnership in areas like Asia and South America.

Furthermore, Dr. Belmans held a workshop titled “The Global Smart Grid Federation: Accelerating the deployments of Smart Grids around the world”, saying that “GSGF is the great opportunity to learn new global trends of smart grid and is creating reports about specific themes by forming working groups (WG). Reports on electric vehicles and grid interaction, interoperability and electrical energy storage in power grids were already created and new Working Groups on microgrids will be formed in this year. He also stated that a global approach is needed for the promotion of smart grids and GSGF is the best opportunity to learn global trends.”

Mr. Watanabe had individual meetings with utilities from South East Asian countries and people from academia, appealed GSGF activities and exchanged views on the current status of smart community promotion and issues in each country.

During the event a road map of smartification in Asian countries was presented. Utilities from Vietnam and Thailand showed the road map for implementing smart grids and presented progress of implementing smart meters, energy management systems such as Wide Area Monitoring System (WAMS) /Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and automation of energy distribution. Utilities from India introduced the promotion of smartification utilizing the Smart Grid Maturity Model (SGMM) which was invented by the U.S.. They also presented  how their approach of smartification differs from that of Western countries, explaining for instance their countermeasure to the issue of stealing electricity in Asian countries: the dissemination of a smart prepaid electricity meter.