Remote Configuration and Control

One of the key advantages of integrating the Guru Hub 3 Core is the ability to remotely configure and control electronic HIU settings, such as set points and operating parameters. This capability supports improved network efficiency by maintaining optimal settings across all HIUs, reducing network drift, and minimising energy waste over time.

Remote configuration eliminates the need for engineers to make on-site visits, reducing labour costs and minimising disruptions for residents. Furthermore, it allows network operators to respond quickly to changing conditions or resident preferences, ensuring that the heat network consistently delivers the desired comfort levels while optimising energy usage and minimising environmental impact.

Intelligent Metering and Billing

The heat meter data captured by the Guru Hub 3 Core is structured and accessible via our Guru platform, making it ideal for accurate and efficient credit billing. This integration streamlines the billing process by providing granular consumption data for each HIU, ensuring fair and transparent billing practices.

By eliminating the need for manual meter readings and reducing the potential for human error, the intelligent metering capabilities of the Guru Hub 3 Core enhance billing accuracy and customer satisfaction.

Advanced Performance Analytics

The high-frequency data collected by the Guru Hub 3 Core can be analysed using machine learning algorithms in the Guru Pinpoint software. This powerful analytical capability enables the identification and resolution of performance issues, leading to improved heat network efficiency and reduced operating costs over time.

Using Guru’s advanced analytics, network operators can gain valuable insights into system performance, identify optimisation opportunities, and make data-driven decisions to enhance overall network operations. This proactive approach to performance management ensures that the heat network operates at its highest efficiency, minimising energy waste and maximising cost savings.

By integrating the Guru Hub 3 Core with electronic HIUs, network operators can use a suite of remote monitoring, control and analytics capabilities, resulting in optimised performance, reduced maintenance requirements, enhanced energy efficiency, and ultimately, lower operating costs across the entire heat network.

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Limitations of Wired M-bus

The traditional wired M-bus approach involves physically connecting heat metres via a shared cable (bus) back to the central data logger. Wired M-Bus, as defined by the EN 13757 standard, does not inherently include encryption. This absence of encryption makes the data transmitted over wired M-Bus networks susceptible to interception and unauthorised access. The standard primarily focuses on the physical and data link layers, with minimal emphasis on security features such as encryption. This results in several drawbacks.

Non-compliance with regulations

We believe that wired M-bus deployments will struggle to meet these regulation standards due to the lack of security and encryption as documented here and here. With the data-driven landscape, ensuring data privacy and security standards is important, especially in the context of GDPR. As utility metre data is considered personal information under GDPR, it is legally required to implement appropriate data protection measures. This is where we think traditional wired M-Bus systems fall short.

Vulnerability to Data Breaches

The M-Bus documentation reveals that wired M-Bus operates using a master-slave communication model where data is transmitted upon request. Without encryption, any data transmitted is in plain text, which malicious actors can intercept. This vulnerability carries significant risks in situations where sensitive personal data must be transmitted with integrity, such as metering for billing or where sitewide wired M-Bus is used as the infrastructure for prepay systems.  Beschreibung des M-bus)

Our Solutions

In contrast, we offer comprehensive metering solutions that are centred around our innovative Guru Hub devices and Pinpoint software. This approach addresses the shortcomings of site-wide wired M-Bus while providing a host of benefits. Our solutions are backed by our ISO 27001 certification for information security ensuring compliance with industry-leading standards.

Compliance with Ofgem regulations

Our solutions are designed to support compliance with the upcoming regulations from Ofgem and codes of practice for district heating networks. By using advanced encryption and supporting diverse data types, we can meet the upcoming requirements for monitoring, data handling, accurate metering and transparent billing practices. Our advanced encryption protocols allow us to safeguard customer data that is transmitted over our secure network.

Flexible and Scalable Data Collection

Guru Hub devices support a wide range of connectivity options allowing for the integration of diverse meter types and data sources. This flexibility enables scalable deployments and supports complex monitoring and optimisation applications.

Powerful Data Analysis and Optimisation

Pinpoint provides a comprehensive platform for data analysis, visualisation, and reporting. Its powerful analytics engine enables organisations to identify inefficiencies, optimise processes, and drive sustainable practices across their operations.

As new and existing heat networks transition to the new regulatory regime, our cutting-edge metering and data management solutions position us as pioneers, offering regulatory compliance and robust data security. 

Heat networks are key to decarbonising heat, which is about a third of UK emissions. But to do that, they’ve got to adopt the kind of strict standards we find in other regulated utilities like gas and electricity, strict standards including information security. The way most of our industry has been handling meter data (for example sending unencrypted data across wired M-Bus networks) just isn’t good enough and we urgently need to move to better standards of security. – Casey Cole, CEO, Guru Systems

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The UK heat network industry hasn’t had much in the way of regulation up to now. The Heat Network (Metering and Billing) Regulations (or “HNMBR”), brought in in 2014, are the only purpose-built regs that UK heat networks have had. But unfortunately they’ve been ineffective.

A key element of the HNMBR is the meter viability calculator for legacy networks, where the heat network operator is meant to carry out a test to assess whether it’s cost effective to install heat meters on customer connections. The method is deeply flawed, which I wrote about back in 2015.

And like most spreadsheets, the viability calculator could be tortured until it told you what you wanted to hear. Didn’t want to install meters? Don’t worry, there’s an app for that. And as a consequence of the flawed method and flexible interpretation, few meters got installed, despite the overwhelming case that meters significantly benefit customers and operators.

The HNMBR also require that heat networks put their hands up every four years to tell the government that they exist. We’ve all suffered from a lack of basic data about how many heat networks there are in the UK, and this requirement was intended to improve levels of transparency.

People needed to take the HNMBR seriously because it’s a criminal offence not to comply and the potential fines are unlimited.

And yet, despite a fairly patchy response from heat networks in the first round of notifications, the OPSS (who oversee the HNMBR) just stood by, while the market looked on with interest like a herd of zebras who suspect that the lion under a nearby tree has no teeth. Or claws.

It soon became clear that the OPSS wasn’t minded to take enforcement action at all. Low and behold, when that first tranche of heat networks were due to make their second notification in 2019, even fewer of them bothered to fill in the forms. Yet only one enforcement action was ever taken, and that was just a compliance notice (a gentle nudge to pull your socks up).

Few meters were installed under the HNMBR. On all those unmetered networks (the Guru team reckon there are something like 400,000 unmetered domestic connections on heat networks in the UK, but remember no one knows for sure) there is no link between how much each heat customer uses and how much they’re charged. Heat network operators have no data to understand the efficiency of their networks, other than it’s really bad. Metered or unmetered, on bad networks, customers are bearing the brunt of inefficiency and too much carbon is being emitted.

Jump to the present day and we’re now preparing for Ofgem to take up the position of regulator of heat networks in 2025. A truly huge amount of work has already gone into formulating these regs; those parts that have already been developed are generally good, specific and proportionate. DESNZ and Ofgem have every possibility of creating a heat network market that’s investible, provides a good deal for customers and results in much lower carbon emissions.

The HNMBR will still be with us in some form after the new regs come in. We don’t yet know whether it will still exist in its own right or get subsumed into the new regs. Importantly, the viability test will almost certainly be scrapped and installation of consumer heat meters will be mandatory in most cases. These are welcome developments.

But whatever the words on the page, it’s the ghost of the HNMBR that poses the biggest threat to the upcoming regulations from Ofgem and to the heat network market as a whole. It’s the spectre of loose, unquantified standards and unenforced rules that already stalks the halls at the new regulator.

Ofgem will be responsible for regulating more than 14,000 heat networks (probably a lot more, remember that no one knows exactly how many there are) all of whom have watched over the last 10 years as well-intentioned regulation fell flat and went largely unenforced.

How do Ofgem get it right? How do they exorcise the ghost of the HNMBR from the halls of number 10, South Colonnade?

First, the regs must be clear and quantified with very little wiggle room. They must be numbers-based, with well defined calculations. There must be no ambiguous holes to drive through, a lá the viability calculator. So far signs are positive here.

Second, Ofgem must enforce and be seen to enforce. They’re going to have to put some heads on pikes at the town gates, and they’re going to have to do this early. Within a year of the regs coming in, Ofgem must be seen to enforce them, and not in a gentle way – in a way that jolts market participants and deters noncompliance among the 14,000+ networks. It needn’t be a large number of enforcements, but they must be highly visible in order to work. And on this one, there’s no evidence either way on whether Ofgem understand what they must do.

If Ofgem repeat the mistakes of the HNMBR and the OPSS, then this whole exercise of bringing proper regulation to heat networks to benefit customers and enable decarbonisation of heat will have been a waste of time. Customers will go unprotected. Many heat networks will continue to be inefficient, have high operating and maintenance costs and continue to emit high levels of carbon.

But get it right and we’ll have taken a significant step towards decarbonising a huge part of the UK economy, creating a fairer energy system for customers in the process.

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