Smart metering for the future energy systems in the Netherlands

Over the past few years there has been a keen interest in smart metering across countries of the European Union. This has been strongly motivated by the EU Energy Efficiency Directive, which among other things aims to minimize the environmental impacts of energy generation and to meet the commitments made on climate change under the Kyoto Protocol. However, the system implementation choices and the roll-out process vary among those countries that have already embarked on the implementation of the system. In this paper we present an overview of the smart metering system implementation in the Netherlands, to conclude about possible lessen learnt applicable for different countries coping with transition problems in the energy sector changing from a traditional hierarchical governance structure into a future system with various different distributed generation sources.