Background: The Government’s vision is for every home to have smart energy meters, empowering people to manage their energy consumption and reduce their carbon emissions. Businesses and public sector users will also have smart or advanced energy metering suited to their needs. The roll-out of smart meters will play an important role in Great Britain’s transition to a low-carbon economy, and help us meet some of the long-term challenges we face in ensuring an affordable, secure and sustainable energy supply. The necessary shared infrastructure for smart meters to operate across competing energy suppliers will be provided by the Data and Communications Company (DCC) and its service providers. The DCC will provide messaging services between the 53 million smart meters in 30 million premises and the business systems of energy suppliers, network operators and other authorised service users. Up to three regional Communications Service Providers (CSPs) will provide the communications infrastructure between the DCC and consumer premises and a single Data Service Provider (DSP) will manage the large volumes of transactional data that flows through the system. The establishment of the DCC and its services will involve creating a new GB-wide entity with reach to the gas and electricity meters in every home and smaller non-domestic premises. To deliver the early establishment of DCC's services, the Government has decided that it will initiate procurement of the two major service provider contracts in parallel with the DCC licence application process. This will bring forward the date at which DCC services can be provided. These procurements are being conducted on behalf of the future DCC Licensee by the Department of Energy and Climate Change and are at the detailed solution stage. The communications services will be separated into three regions organised along aggregated distribution network operator (DNO) licence area boundaries. The regional lots being: • Northern GB including Scotland; • Central GB including Wales; and • Southern GB. The communication services scope is centred on the provision of communications services between the IT infrastructure hosting the data applications above and the smart metering system in each consumer premises. Achieving GB-wide coverage requires more than one technology so the regional CSPs are required to integrate communications services. The scope of the data services is broken up into three work packages: • Systems integration (SI) services • IT infrastructure services • Applications management services (AMS) These four contracts (one data and three communications) will be between 7 and 15 years in length, and have a total estimated contract value of more than £1billion. Requirements: Main Research Bidders for the CSP and DSP procurements will provide several iterations of both cost and pricing information for both initial review and evaluation. To ensure value for money, and to test the cost effectiveness of individual bidders’ solutions, the programme wishes to compare bidders’ cost and price information with: • Bottom-up cost estimates of each bidder’s proposed technical solution to ensure that the costs proposed by the bidder for their solution are comparable with programme estimates. These estimates will be obtained from bidders as part of the procurement process. • Similar smart metering data and communication contracts. These will provide benchmark estimates for contracts providing similar services. The supplier is expected to provide data and analysis to allow for such benchmark comparisons to be made by DECC. In order for DECC to be able to make valid comparisons the supplier would be expected to provide comparison data covering the following as a minimum: CSP • Basic smart metering communications services; and • Enhanced communications services incorporating smart grid type messages (e.g. demand side response messaging). DSP • Smart metering access control and translation systems (headend); • IT hosting services; • Application maintenance and support services; and • Applications development and system integration resource rate card. The estimates will provide DECC with the confidence that the proposed prices are reflective of market prices and the costs which would be incurred by the bidders to deliver their proposed solutions, and that therefore these proposed solutions offer value for money. The detailed approach to this is expected to be determined by the supplier. Further information, such as pricing structures, will be made available to the successful bidder to provide a more in depth understanding of these requirements. However, DECC may require that a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) be signed by the supplier prior to its release. Ancillary Services In addition it is envisaged that the SMIP will require the ability to call off against any resulting contract any necessary ad-hoc research and benchmarking services – such as service level agreement (SLA) benchmarking.
Ref: 511/11/12,
Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)
One Victoria Street
London
SW1H 0ET
Andrew Wilson
0300 068 6073
andrew.wilson@decc.gsi.gov.uk
United Kingdom
Contract value: 50000.00 - 80000.00GBP
Published: 9 Nov 2012, Receipt by: 23 Nov 2012
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