I have a 3-phase 4-quadrant electricity meter installed because I have a photovoltaic plant on the roof of house. A 4-quadrant electricity meter means it can measure both consumption and generation of energy (forward and reverse direction).
Let's assume I have an home appliance consuming 1 kW of energy and I'm generating 1 kW of energy from a PV plant at the same time. The appliance is connected to phase A and the generator is connected to phase B.
After one hour what will be the change in readings? Will it be 0 kWh consumed & 0 kWh generated or 1 kWh consumed & 1 kWh generated and why?
My location is Slovakia, EU, the meter is Itron ACE6000.
Update
In Slovakia (as of 2013) it's better to consume the generated energy myself than to feed it back to the network, which should be (and is for me) the most important reason to build a PV plant.
Best Answer
As you already know, 4-quadrant electricity meter just means it can measure the flow of power to the customer even if it is a reverse flow.
Your concern is whether generation and demand is recorded separately, or if the meter only records the net power flow. The key is that your meter is a "multi-phase" meter. Because your generator is connected to a different phase than your load, your ACE6000 can record the flows for each phase separately and independently.
You can see that each phase is measured and recorded on page 7 of this manual for the ACE SL7000, a brother to the ACE6000.
http://jocuccok.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/itron-ace-sl7000-tb-gb-0903.pdf