Enedis named ‘smartest’ utility globally
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French DSO Enedis has for the third time in a row topped SP Group’s Smart Grid Index benchmarking the ‘smartness’ of utility power grids globally.
The 2024 index, which is based on a revised methodology from previous years (and hence not published in 2023 while this was under way) benchmarks a total of 92 utilities across 36 countries.
Tied in second place is TaiPower from Taiwan and UK Power Networks, followed closely by similarly tied Australia’s CitiPower & Powercor, Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA) and State Grid Shanghai.
Rounding out the top ten list is New York’s Con Edison, State Grid Beijing and the two GB network operators SP Energy Networks and WPD (now part of National Grid).
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Conversely at the bottom of the list are Enel Distribution Chile, Brazil’s Light, the two Buenos Aires utilities Edenor and Edesur, E-distributie Dobrogea and E-distributie Muntenia from Romania and Johannesburg’s City Power.
The Smart Grid Index draws on public available data to analyse seven dimensions of a smart grid, i.e. monitoring and control, data analytics, supply reliability, distributed energy resource integration, green energy, security and customer empowerment and satisfaction.
Key findings of the index highlighted are that the utilities have attained strong growth across these dimensions and strong growth in renewables and electric vehicle initiatives since the last index.
However, while North America leads the maturity levels, the strongest growth has occurred in the Asia Pacific region, in particular with the progress in the deployment of AMI, consistently outpacing the global average.
Enedis as the top performer with a total score of 98.2% is found to exhibit best practices in six of the seven dimensions, the seventh in which it is not categorised being supply reliability as measured by the SAIDI and SAIFI.
The other top utilities count on best practices in five of the dimensions, while those at the bottom on only a single one – monitoring and control – or none of them.
In a statement Enedis records that its ranking underlines the long-term work it has carried out to develop innovative solutions, strengthen the reliability of the network and support the needs of the energy transition.
“With 40,000 employees and 1.4 million km of power lines, the company manages the leading fleet of connected objects, including more than 37.6 million Linky smart meters installed in France.”
