“Simply put, the upcoming regulations ensure that train operators with energy meters installed onboard their locomotives will be billed according to their exact energy consumption. Of course, train operators that do not have energy meters installed will have to be invoiced the old way, based on a calculated estimate. But those who have invested in meters will pay only for the energy they consume, which really adds up in the long-run,” explains Mr. Stømer. “Countries have until May 1st to meet the 2020 deadline for this new rule. However, after 2020, they are given an implementation period of two years prior to the final deadline in 2022.”

Mr. Stømer continues by saying that, in order to be compliant in time, each member state needs to have a settlement system that can allocate consumptions to the correct country, and exchange the data coming from the meters to the correct settlement systems. This settlement system should also be able to validate the data coming from the meters, estimate missing data, and allocate the consumption data to the train operator.

“Many countries have spent tens of millions of Euro trying to accomplish this, but many have been unsuccessful. Because of this, we now have a lot of countries approaching us about joining Eress and implementing the Erex system. The reason being that Erex is the only international system that is fully compliant with the latest deadlines and has been working for many years now. It is also quick to set up, so long as you have the necessary infrastructure in place.” He then adds, “We are currently developing some of the subsystems — including a data collection solution — to help our partners with this. In fact, we will soon be transitioning to Erex 2.0 which is more user-friendly and has a much larger capacity to keep operations running smoothly. We are in the process of testing this development and will be rolling it out in the second quarter of 2020.”

 
If you are interested to know more about Erex, please contact: jaccla@banenor.no

Terje Stømer