The Benefits and Pitfalls of Smart Meter Data Collection

In recent years, the demand for electricity has been increasing in households because various appliances and newest technologies have been used on an everyday basis. This raises concerns about the lack of electricity production around the globe. There is also a need for people to track their daily power usage in houses. The aim of this thesis is to explain the term smart metering and its benefits for both people that might use this technology in their households, and for companies. Smart meters allow people to track and control their energy consumption and eventually it might result in cheaper costs of the resources. What is more, the smart meters help consumers to know specific information about the consumption of electricity for appliances. In a global scale, the smart metering technology is used in smart grids which are more environmentally friendly power grids with higher efficiency and greater energy production. This work also focuses on the overall distribution of smart meters both in the Czech Republic and in the world. Nowadays, there are many projects in progress that are trying to switch from traditional power plants to smart grids with the intention to increase energy production and to become eco-friendly. The companies behind these projects have already published some of their researches which bring positive information about the energy production. The majority of these projects should be in progress until 2020 and some until 2025. Therefore, the final conclusion whether the smart metering technology will replace the traditional power grids and will be implemented in households cannot be drawn yet. This thesis also contains a practical part in which I create a user interface in Grafana, which is an open-source software for time series analytics. The user interface is created for a Raspberry Pi touch display which has a sensor connected to it that allows us to measure energy consumption of electricity meters. The measured values are then presented in useful graphs and gauges in Grafana, and also on the display itself