Integrated Utility Account

A Report by Amit Raj

1. Overview

The world evolved from a big bang explosion and we got a beautiful Earth to live in. It took years to travel from the world of Dinosaurs to the world of happily living with our family in a safe home watching television. Watching television is just an exam of how we evolve and innovate the natural resources for example our happy and safe life. However, this evolution will not last longer if we will not consider the conservation of our natural resources. Electricity, Water, Gas synthesized from natural resources should be tightly tracked and conserved for our next generations. Several government and private initiatives have been government taken to conserve natural resources for a smarter life style in a smarter world. tural This project is an initial phase of the C group project Integrated Utility Account (IUA) Intention of this ect Citi (IUA). phase is to find out the desirability of the project to carry it out to the next level. The scope of the project is to find out the various facts and information through web and interviewing concerned energy authorities and consumers and analyze the importance IUA.

Desirability

Validity

Feasibility

2. Citi Group and Irish Market

Citi, a global financial firm primarily working for banking and financial services. It has around 200 million customers and doing business in more than 140 countries. Citi has been divided into Citicorp and Citi holding, collectively maintains a wide portfolio of financial services and products which include consumer wide banking, investment banking, securities, transaction services and wealth management. Citi enables its customer to do their banking and manage their finances with full security and trust. Citi primarily believes in innovation to provide better services for its customers. As a part of innovation, Citi has opened its first Research, Development, Innovation and Learning (RDIL) centre at Dublin. The RDILs responsibility is to find out the existing problems and solve them through innovative solutions and help Citi to convert these sting solutions into business opportunities. RDIL Dublin has estimated that 75% of the population in 2050 will be living in the cities. An interesting business opportunity may come from the digitization of the cities. Digitization brings more financial opportunities for Citi and enables citizens to live in a smarter world. Citi Smart metering of water and power (electricity + gas) can help people from day to day problems and educate them about smart use of water and power to save their money as well. ate

3. My Work

Under the course work of Creative Thinking and Innovation module of Innovation academy, I was working with Citi group along with my 3 other colleagues. We divided the project into various parts and I worked on analyzing the global position of smart meters and various facts and figures of various markets. I collected information through web, interviewing people and various journal papers. I found that various European countries are working on regulating the use of smart meters for tracking and billing their electricity and water usage. Amsterdam smart city project is one of the great examples. Various companies have provided the infrastructure to find out real-time usage and costing whereas others are working on web interfaces to track and pay bills electronically. Banks like HSBC has come up with a bill payment utility service in close integration with utility companies. I also analyzed that Irish electricity market size is around 7 billion per year. This market is captured by big players like ESB Electric Ireland, Airtricity, Bord Gais. Water market is captured by Dublin City Council, providing free water for domestic use but charging for non-domestic use and collectively water market size is 2 billion per year. RPS consulting firm has suggested the requirement of new water resources by 2016 and government is planning to make domestic water usage chargeable.

4. Personal Learning and Outcome

As a part of learning, I had a wonderful experience of working in a multidisciplinary team. I learnt innovation and creative thinking is the basis for project planning, managing and execution. Small facts and irrelevant information sometime helped me to think more creatively and learnt that each of the small information is important. Meeting with different people and interacting with different thoughts helped me broaden my area of thinking.