Itron

Itron

Itron

Introduction

As your utility has added customers over the years, you’ve probably looked for ways to gather meter data more efficiently. If you distribute multiple products — electricity, water, natural gas — or serve a diverse service area, you may have installed multiple types of meter reading solutions. Today your utility may have tens or even hundreds of thousands or millions of meters from multiple manufacturers generating data that’s gathered in multiple ways. Your large investment in gathering meter data has helped your billing department keep pace with change and growth, but now other groups within your utility are asking for more data. Or, perhaps you are looking for ways to share the operational costs of deploying AMR across the multiple groups that can all gain some advantage with this data. Ideally, you need one simple way to collate and analyze all your meter data for forecasting, planning, energy delivery, maintenance, and more to help keep your system reliable, profitable, and competitive.

Properly managed meter data enables utilities to predict system load and usage to avoid imbalances and reduce off-network purchases. Data analysis can help pinpoint over- or under-utilized infrastructure, improve system throughput, speed service restoration after outages, and more. Properly managed data means your utility can deliver more value to customers and shareholders for less overall cost. Data itself becomes an asset. Although this may sound like technology from a hi-tech future, meter data management really just supports the basic and sound operation of energy delivery. It enables operational efficiency, cost reduction, and meeting current and future goals with fewer resources. Meter data helps utility leaders make good decisions, deploy new supporting technologies and get the most return out of their existing base of assets.

This paper will discuss strategies for implementing a centralized meter data management system, how such a system interacts with multiple metering technologies and data applications, and the benefits that meter data management can supply to employees, customers, and shareholders.

The Case for Meter Data Management

Typically, organizations that are considering installing meter data management systems have some or all of these traits in common.

What do these characteristics mean in the real world of energy delivery? Here are three scenarios.

Implementing Automated Meter Reading

Advances in metering and communication technologies continue to provide a wide range of options for automated meter reading (AMR). Today, no single vendor can offer a solution that covers all terrains, territories and meter reading issues. Utilities may have multiple AMR solutions within the same territory. Adding a new AMR technology may fix a meter-reading problem, but it can also affect existing systems and processes and create a separate silo of data within the organization.

AMR can provide a much higher frequency of data as meter reading moves from monthly to daily or even hourly. While the data is valuable in many ways, the shear growth in data introduces concerns about the volume, scalability, and processing power of existing systems. In particular, many current residential billing systems are not structured to handle more than one reading per billing cycle. Billing is structured around routes, but with the introduction of fixed network AMR, routes may no longer be necessary or meaningful.

How can utilities interface these best-of-breed collection systems to existing collection, billing, and IT systems?

Managing Multiple Technologies

Mergers and acquisitions have left utilities with multiple technologies that do the same thing. Newlyformed utilities may have multiple collection systems from multiple vendors. Data from different vendors and organizations is stored separately, thus requiring synchronization, manipulation and maintenance of multiple systems. The different streams of data may be incompatible, requiring that EBCDIC data be transformed to ASCII (or vice verse). Or XML, flat files and delimited files must be parsed to find the common data elements. Each solution must exchange data with multiple other solutions, creating an unmanageable web of interfaces between billing departments, meter shops, field service organizations, outage management teams, and more.

How can an organization undergoing transformation tame all this technology?

Regulatory compliance

Recent corporate accounting and securities scandals have brought additional regulatory requirements to an energy sector already familiar with compliance issues. In particular, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act mandates an unprecedented level of financial auditing and transparency. Under the act, public companies have new requirements governing whether financial statements are accurate, controls are adequate, disclosures are
timely, and that documents and data supporting the financial assertions are controlled.

How can an energy supplier who sells multiple products at multiple rates to multiple customer classes, and collects the sales information through multiple systems, make sure that their accounting and financial reporting is accurate, controlled, and timely?

These three scenarios point to impending — or ongoing — technological chaos for energy providers. How to tame the chaos?

Characteristics of a Meter Data Management Solution

Meter data management solutions provide a single data repository can gather data from multiple metering systems and then supply that data to multiple applications such as billing, forecasting, customer service, system operation and maintenance. Mapping multiple metering systems to multiple business applications through a single repository organizes your meter data to help you run your business more efficiently. Good meter data management solutions adapt to your situation, accommodating your unique combination of meters, meter reading technologies, billing systems, and analytic needs. They also help you find ways to reduce costs, increase revenues, and deliver more value to your customers.

The core of meter data management is a single database or repository of customer, meter, and reading data. Data exports and application programming interfaces (APIs) push or pull data between the repository and the multiple destinations that rely on meter data. This helps ensure that consistent processes are applied to a single set of data. Such processes include calculation services (aggregations and calculations on interval data performed in a controlled and consistent fashion); validation, estimation and editing (confirmation that collection systems and meters are functioning properly); best read rules; and more. Audit logs record all changes and corrections to data, including who, how, and why edits were made. Import logs track if any data was not captured successfully. All versions of, and changes to, data are retained for as long as needed for historical perspective or regulatory compliance. The data is safeguarded by both data- and role-based security.

How would such meter data management systems, which exist today, respond to the three scenarios posed
earlier?

Strategies for Implementing Meter Data Management

While each case will be slightly different, because each organization’s collection of disparate meters, meter reading, and data processing systems is different, implementation of meter data management solutions usually includes these steps.

Benefits of Meter Data Management

In addition to the three scenarios discussed earlier, meter data management enables a whole host of other services that are beneficial to energy providers and their customers. Here’s a sample.

Outage management

A single repository of meter data greatly eases the management of power outage data. With AMR systems that provide outage or restore information, a meter data management system can record outage start and restore times; organize events by meter, customer, fixed network collector, and transformer; push alerts to external outage management systems; and filter and present meter events to identify problem areas Having a central system provides standard interfaces to receive events from AMR systems and standard events codes, regardless of meter or collection system type. It insulates outage management systems from having to understand the details of how meter reading systems report events.

All of these abilities benefit both the energy provider and its customers by verifying power outages before sending field personnel to investigate (potentially saving money), diminishing revenue loss with early warning of problems from meters, and accurately counting outage durations for important public service scores.

Distribution planning and reliability

By combining historical customer data from meter data management with historical weather data and transformer capacity ratings, electricity providers can start to predict how transformers might perform under extreme weather conditions. Pinpointing a potentially overloaded transformer before it fails has several benefits. Crews can fix problems during scheduled work hours, saving the utility overtime. Utilities don’t lose revenue because of a disruption to service. Customers enjoy continuous service; for the sick and the elderly, this can be critical during extreme weather conditions. Likewise, pinpointing potentially underutilized transformers means that utilities have to opportunity to right-size their equipment in an orderly fashion. This saves on labor and equipment costs while possibly expanding the capacity of the distribution system.

Revenue assurance

By relying on a central repository of historic meter data, analytics can pinpoint usage patterns that might indicate meter defect, meter tampering, or theft of service. If a customer’s energy usage remains abnormally low during heat waves, cold snaps, or before and after outages, then the meter might be malfunctioning. If more energy is flowing past distribution points than is being billed for, then it’s possible that someone is stealing service. Without meter data management, this type of revenue-assuring analysis is nearly impossible.

Even though this means more revenue to the utility, it also means better service and better costs to the customers. Utilities recapturing revenue from those people stealing services don’t need to raise their rates to cover stolen services. In some parts of the world, theft of service accounts for 20% or more of power consumption. Tamper detection can make a huge difference to energy providers and to the vast majority of honest, paying customers.

Forecasting and curtailment

By applying advanced statistical modeling to the historic data stored in meter data management systems, utilities can generate highly accurate forecasts of future energy demand. Balancing supply and demand is the heart of a reliable and stable energy delivery system. Solid, accurate forecasts remove the guesswork from daily operations and long-term planning, lowering both risk and cost. Purchasing last-minute power on the spot market can be very expensive. Accurate and timely forecasts also provide energy intelligence that is directly applicable to infrastructure construction and maintenance, pricing contracts, supply schedules, load profiles, rate design, and energy efficiency.

With the ability to predict times of peak demand, utilities and their customers can then form partnerships to reduce extreme loads, thus maintaining a reliable and affordable supply of power. Power-intensive C&I customers can voluntarily reduce their consumption during peak times in exchange for payments or credit from the utility. On the residential side, utilities that have addressable thermostats installed in homes can change heating or cooling thresholds a degree or two over a large number of homes, thereby lowering the
system stress while continuing service.

Conclusion

Organizations that undergo the transformative process of adopting meter data management solutions start to realize efficiencies and savings as soon as the solutions come on-line. Many of them continue to find ways to earn a return on their investment in meter data management through new and innovative ways to apply meter data throughout the organization. At that point, meter data is truly shaping the utility of the future.

About Itron:

Itron is a leading technology provider and critical source of knowledge to the global energy and water industries. More than 3,000 utilities worldwide rely on Itron technology to deliver the knowledge they require to optimize the delivery and use of energy and water. Itron delivers value to its clients by providing
industry-leading solutions for electricity metering; meter data collection; energy information management; demand response; load forecasting, analysis and consulting services; distribution system design and optimization; web-based workforce automation; and enterprise and residential energy management. To know more, start here: www.itron.com .