Economic Efficiency of the Internet of Things Solution in the Energy Industry: A Very High Voltage Frosting Case Study

This article deals with the deployment of an Internet of Things (IoT) technology within the energy industry (energy distribution) in the Czech Republic. The first part of the article is devoted to an assessment of the perspectives for developing IoT applications and implementing them within the economy, and then examines how the principles of multi-criteria decision-making are used to select IoT technologies for deployment in the energy industry. The selection of technology is also followed by the selection of the specific application with the highest potential benefit for the company using such a method to select the technology. The selection solution is demonstrated and further discussed from the technological and financial standpoints and illustrated via the example of choosing among two alternatives for a real-world application, very high voltage (VHV) frosting (in electric power transmission engineering, which is usually considered as any voltage between 52,000 and 300,000 V). The application solution is analyzed by how it relates to the direct vs indirect measurement of glaze ice. The result of this technical and financial analysis was that the direct glaze ice measurement variant is clearly the more advantageous one. The direct-measurement variant has a three-year payoff period, compared to six years for indirect measurement. Further, the benefits from the direct-measurement variant are 2.25 times larger than the other variant, and the five-year net profit value amounts to a profit for the direct-measurement variant while it results in a financial loss for the indirect-measurement variant. The recommended variant is to measure the icing of VHV lines directly.