Electric power utilities are striving to address critical challenges such as energy consumption, material recovery, e-waste, procurement, and supplier working conditions. Currently, they are converting their old infrastructure into smart grids. The installation of smart meters is a key step in this process. Since a smart meter is an intelligent and modern measuring device that includes computer-aided measurements while also allowing intelligent management and determination of residential and industrial users' energy consumption and supply, their deployment in smart grids is of major importance. In this study, considering that the estimated number of smart meter units will be 188.12 million units by 2025, five different types of smart meters are used to estimate their failure behavior. We adopted the probability of smart meters' survival, considering the number of the components included in their PCBs, while the influence of their components follows an exponential distribution for a given lifetime. The meaning of the "fair" smart meter is introduced to solve critical concerns such as energy use, material consumption, e-waste, supplier sourcing, and labor conditions. To achieve the above targets, a circular economy chain analysis is implemented by dismantling the existing smart meters, classifying their materials into five primary groups and weighing them to obtain average values. Moreover, we calculate the average cost of the components using their equivalent market value as provided by stock markets to get the average weight of each component in terms of material cost. Finally, we introduce the "remanufacturing index" and the "reusing index" indices as procedure metrics to further quantify the circular economy chain results. The results show that the percentage of the reusing procedure in the "fair" smart meter circular economy chain is greater than the corresponding percentage of the remanufacturing procedure, while the percentage of the recycling procedure is increased as the recycling cost per unit, is also increased.
Keywords: Circular economy; Failure rate; Fair smart meter; Lifetime; Printed circuit boards; Recycling; Remanufacturing.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.