Romet: advanced energy management
What recent achievements has the company made, and its customers made using its technologies?
Romet has been serving the natural gas industry since 1972, marking this year as the company’s 50th anniversary. Since its founding, Romet has been committed to providing customer-centric measurement and monitoring solutions to the natural gas industry by continually investing into technological innovation and development.
Romet has recently released BrightLync, an industry-first cloud communications solution that does not require any fixed-based infrastructure such as towers, servers, and pole-mounted antennas. This innovation has made two-way over-the-air (OTA) asset communication, data retrieval, and data analytics more easily accessible to gas utilities, enabling them with the tools necessary to transition to a completely digitalized and connected ecosystem.
With access to closed loop data management, Romet’s gas utility customers are able to implement new energy efficiency programmes for their large volume commercial and industrial end-users. Such programmes include demand side management initiatives, time-of-use billing, and mitigation of lost and unaccounted for gas.
Where is the business in terms of its growth so far and the milestones it wants to achieve moving forward?
Supporting the evolution of the natural gas industry as it leads the successful energy transition is at the core of Romet’s growth strategy. Introduction of renewable energy sources for distribution while enabling energy conservation and utilisation are important to supporting the energy transition and supporting the commitment to achieving the Paris Agreement for climate change.
Romet’s focus is on developing robust solutions that not only perform in the current environment but, through technological innovation, are ready for the future as well. This gives our customers a means to be more efficient in the distribution and usage of gas energy. The opportunity exists to provide customers with the ability to dynamically assess and predict energy needs; and by creating a transparent environment with their end users to demonstrate real-time usage. Business decisions based on this kind of information can have a positive impact on operating efficiency, profitability, conservation, and ultimately on climate change.
Beyond North America, is there a market for Romet’s technologies?
Romet’s “technology stack” is designed around creating a “connected grid” for gas utilities, enabling mature, deployed infrastructure to provide access to real-time data to enable better and more efficient decisions —regardless of geographical markets.
With this new approach to energy management, gas and hybrid utilities can have greater insights into energy utilisation, conservation and demand management, all the while improving operating efficiencies. Romet has traditionally been a gas measurement company, providing solutions to our customers supporting robust and reliable customer billing. Today, Romet is much more than a meter manufacturer. We support our customer’s need for highly robust and reliable information that drives better, more timely, decisions and therefore helping their end customers have safe, economical and environmentally responsible energy supply.
Has the energy crisis impacted efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in North America? If so, how?
The global energy crisis has reaffirmed the need for a balanced approach when it comes to responsible, sustainable, and economically available energy production for consumers and businesses worldwide. There must be a balance between reaching the highest levels of environmental sustainability but also ensuring energy is readily and affordably accessible for the average family. To continually work towards emissions reductions goals, while maintaining affordable energy, the future of energy supply must be based on a balanced and connected approach. One that utilises sustainable electricity generation along-side natural gas and alternative (i.e. hydrogen) gas to meet growing demand while achieving a total solution for greenhouse gas reduction. Through this balanced approach, the individual needs of customers can be addressed, energy storage assured, and a resilient and safe energy ecosystem achieved.
To what extent is regulation/policy in the markets you work in conducive to operators adopting your technologies and improving their operations?
With many nations worldwide committed to aggressive emissions reduction and clean energy goals, gas and hybrid utilities face the challenge of developing new strategies to optimise their operations and meet federal emissions targets. The socio-political pressure associated with such policies has accelerated the need for utilities to adopt new technologies to enable energy efficiency and renewable energy initiatives. Romet has designed and positioned its technology platforms to be seamlessly adapted to the maturing natural gas distribution infrastructure, providing the foundational technology platform to enable utilities to completely digitise their asset data – opening the door to tools for advanced computing and machine learning analytics.
Romet’s technology platforms are ideally suited to support our customers in increasing their situational oversight on geographically diverse delivery systems. These interconnected grids enable system levelling energy conservation, integrated resource planning, demand response planning and overall asset health monitoring. When this captured and aggregated data is combined with advanced computing and machine learning analytics of Energy Array™, it leads to better decisions that are based on factual information that support four of the largest drivers for our utilities: safety, reliability, economic and environmental responsibility.
Another in a continuing series featuring the work of Gas Pathways Platform participants in advancing natural gas innovation.