As long as car manufacturers provide their customers with free electricity via their own charging infrastructures, kilowatt-hour precision in billing won’t be users’ top priority. No one looks a gift horse in the mouth, and no one looks too hard at prices or precise consumption data. But as soon as consumers have to pay for that energy, their behavior changes. Therefore, charging stations in Germany need meters that comply with calibration law. This applies not only to charging stations for e-vehicles, but also to network feed-in of solar energy and sub-metering contracts, such as are found in retail – wherever providers bill for energy, suitable meters need to be used. This is the only way to guarantee that the consumption billing complies with the law.
The basis for this is MID Directive 2014/32/EU. The so-called Measuring Instruments Directive (MID) is a European Union regulation intended to harmonize many aspects of legal metrology in all EU countries. It applies throughout the EU to all types of measuring instruments: from water meters, to electrical energy meters, to scales and taxi meters. The MID sets basic performance standards for measuring instruments, sets requirements that apply up to initial commissioning and governs manufacturers’ obligations. In addition to compliance with calibration law, WAGO’s energy meters with MID certification offer other benefits, which can be demonstrated by four example applications.
