Kansai T&D modernizes 14M smart meters on AWS with zero downtime

Kansai T&D’s first-generation smart meter system was launched in 2012. Built by multiple vendors, the on-premises system had become a patchwork of different operating systems and middleware. System maintenance and repairs consumed significant resources, and replacing servers and communication devices grew increasingly costly as the number of installed meters expanded. 

Regulatory authorities set a 2025 deadline for utilities to launch next-generation smart meter systems. Kansai T&D needed to modernize its existing infrastructure while building an entirely new system that was capable of adapting to new technologies and supporting advanced data collection and analysis. 

After evaluating several cloud providers, Kansai T&D found a path forward on AWS. The utility recognized that AWS services would meet its requirements for high availability, enterprise-grade security, and processing of massive data volumes.

Kansai T&D first migrated its existing smart meter system to AWS in granular stages to maintain virtually zero downtime for the 14 million meters in operation. The company rearchitected the system to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), an easy-to-manage relational database, for data management. Using AWS managed services, Kansai T&D no longer needs to procure, install, or replace physical servers. The company can also scale compute resources automatically for consistent performance.

Next, Kansai T&D built its second-generation smart meter system on the cloud. The architecture needed to handle continuous data transmission every 30 minutes from millions of smart meters while also processing intermittent control signals for remote connections and event detection. Kansai T&D deployed AWS Lambda, a service used to run code without thinking about servers or clusters, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which provides fully managed message queuing, to create a serverless, event-driven architecture that scales automatically with demand. 

Data flows through the smart meter communication hub to the meter data management system, then to a unified data repository built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service. Here, Amazon Athena, an interactive query service, derives the necessary information from the log data to perform the log analysis.

The first-generation smart meter system also uses Amazon Quick Sight, which provides AI-powered business intelligence capabilities, to visualize the communication paths and quickly predict the fault location. Kansai T&D plans to use Amazon Quick Sight and Amazon Athena to support and enhance data-driven decision-making in the future.

This technical transformation required organizational change, and Kansai T&D worked closely alongside AWS Professional Services, a team that helps accelerate business transformations on AWS with proven, industry-specific expertise, to build cloud knowledge from the ground up. “AWS has supported us not only with the technology but also with project management policies,” says Mr. Yasuo Matsuura, chief digital officer at Kansai T&D. “They even helped us with the training and development of human resources as the basis for future operations.”

Since October 2024, Kansai T&D’s first-generation system has operated fully on AWS. The second-generation system entered field trials in October 2025 with full deployment planned for the beginning of January 2026.

By moving away from managing hundreds of physical servers and network components, Kansai T&D freed up the equivalent of one full-time employee’s worth of work—redirecting that capacity toward innovation and business development. The migration is set to deliver a 13 percent cost reduction in total cost of ownership over a 10-year period for the first-generation system.

Most importantly, Kansai T&D has accelerated its ability to innovate. Development cycles are down from 3–4 years on premises to 2–3 years on the cloud, with managed services removing months of hardware procurement and environment setup. Proof-of-concept cycles now take 3–4 months, empowering Kansai T&D to rapidly test new ideas. The cloud infrastructure has also unlocked access to data that was previously unavailable in the on-premises environment, empowering Kansai T&D to use analytics to gain insights into consumer usage patterns, industrial consumption behavior, and emerging trends that inform strategic decision-making.

By 2035, Kansai T&D plans to replace all 14 million first-generation meters with second-generation units. “Using AWS cloud services has brought us a reduction in operational tasks and flexible, scalable system operation that’s aligned with business growth,” says Mr. Matsuura. “We have established both stable and reliable service provisioning and the foundation for our future.”