Power Player

Dr. Maher Chebbo has been heavily involved in the development of the EU smart grid.
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Whatever the pace of development or the motivation for adopting smart grids, Chebbo has a very clear vision of the future of grids. “The customers and the plants, renewables and the central production of power, all that will be connected like you have internet today that is connecting everybody, that will be the case in every region and every country.

There will be a shift from just electricity management to information management. There will be much more data on the network, more electronics and ICT in the networks. We believe that internet will be much more important in the future and will be the network that will have all these things communicate well together every time.”
It is a fair bet that Chebbo will be there to help put this vision into place.

Smart Grid – Do you speak EU?
‘Smart Grid’ has become one of the buzz words in the industry. The term describes the increasing sophistication of acquiring and using data for billing, customer relationship management, and energy efficiency.

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Smart grips are instrumental for the addition of renewables into the energy mix, with smart metering and the management of power exchange facilitating the move towards feed-in tariffs and small-scale renewable energy production coming online.

The term has its origins in the efforts of the European Union to create a grid capable of supporting environmental targets. “The story of the smart grid started in Europe in 2005,” explains Chebbo.

“That year, the European Commission created a technology platform, bringing in stakeholders from the market and asking them to think about the next 10 years. The platform was called the European Technology Platform for Electricity of the Future, and it included representatives from utitlies, academia, suppliers and technology companies like SAP – I was and still am part of it.

We started thinking about how to call this electricity of the future initiative, and we came up with smart grid. That term is now used even by Obama.”

SAP in the utilities sector
SAP has been active in the utilities sector ever since the company was founded 1972. After the focus had initially been on back office and ERP, the scope since widened to include other areas.

SAP offers enterprise asset management software, designed to help manage the construction and maintenance of infrastructure assets such as power plants and networks. Its customer information system encompasses the tools used by utilities to bill their customers and carry out their customer relationship management operations. Finally, SAP’s energy data management systems help its clients collect information about consumption patterns, and can be used to optimise the running of the grid.