Gas smart metering features and advantages, Covid impact assessment and KPI feedback system design for clients and retailers.

The energy field is one of the key sectors to innovate and rethink through investments, research and innovation, if we want to ensure the environmental and sustainability targets set out by the worldwide governments’ agendas during the Conference of the Parties since 1995. Even if the Covid pandemic situation has lowered the global energy demand and the CO2 emissions, the forecasts still predict a rebound effect on the primary energy demand between 10% and 5% higher than the pre-Covid levels by 2030, with a magnitude depending on the type of policies that will be chosen in the next decade and on the enduring of the pandemics. Above all the fossil sources, gas is expected to perform better than the other ones, in all the IEA scenarios, with the demand that is going to remain the same of the pre-Covid levels (SDS), slightly decrease (NZE2050), or even increase up to 30% (STEPS). If we focus on the drivers variations we expect to have positive contributions (additional market growth, switch to natural gas) and negative ones (efficiency and switch from natural gas). One of the key contributions is efficiency, that is going to be a key driver, which could be achieved through retrofitting interventions (building insulations), direct interventions (heating system replacement), and through energy efficiency actions directly related to users’ behaviour change. To achieve all these results, a proper sensibilization of the user about its habits and consumption must be done. Besides, digitalization has started playing a central role in the gas sector too and is going to increase with time and produce major if the impact will be the same it has been for the others: in USA, in the last 20 years, the digitalized sectors experienced revenues increase by 410%, compared to the increase 75% of the others. In the gas field, the impact concerns the time for the approval of the projects, the procurement efficiency, the reduction of the operational costs, the higher reading frequency, the remote control and the unlock of new technologies such as big data and predictive analytics. This master thesis study has the target to explore and to demonstrate the potential of smart metering in the gas distribution sector, one of the biggest digital innovations of this decade in this field, that is already a reality. From these devices already a huge amount of data is present, but still their potential has not been fully exploited. First, in this study we will try to use part of the consumption data they can collect to monitor the consumption on the big scale, with high accuracy, high frequency and almost in real-time, for helping the retailers estimate the consumption of their users and for unlocking the possibility to perform large scale analysis. Second, we will try to use the smart meters’ data to foster energy saving by designing a proper feedback system for the users, in which it will be possible to monitor the personal daily consumption, analyze the personal performances, set out personal targets, correlate the consumption behavior with their building characteristics and compare the users’ behavior with other similar clients. All the data have been extracted from the DSO company’s databases using SQL language and filtered through DAX language. Then, they have been imported, elaborated and shown on the data elaboration software Power BI to perform big data analysis and to produce dashboards that potentially could be shared directly in a company or with the user.