It’s a potent tool for utilities.
It’s one of their most powerful resources, yet remains underutilized. It’s information about their customers’ energy consumption and demand patterns.
Using customer energy information gives utilities the opportunity to build unprecedented business-to-business and business-to-consumer demographic profiles, an important driver in marketing to energy customers.
Readily available accurate, reliable and timely information about how and when customers use energy can enable utilities to help customers manage their energy consumption more efficiently. It can facilitate load shedding and suggest improvements in operational procedures. Ultimately, using energy information intelligently can help retain customers, especially in deregulated areas.
But that’s not all.
Besides satisfying customers, energy information also can help utilities. Short- and long-term load management and planning, distribution planning, outage management and demand response programs all can benefit from analyzing customers’ energy information. It can produce valuable insights that can help streamline billing and create revenue generating value-added services.
Utilities can create Time of Use and other rates to encourage customers to use energy when it’s less expensive for utilities to provide it. Properly designed rates might generate less revenue, but they drive down cost of service, driving up profit.
The keystone to realizing all this potential is to frequently gather the energy data from meters, ensure its integrity and present it as actionable, customer-specific load profiles. The profiles need to be in an understandable and ‘massageable’ format that utilities and customers can use efficiently.
There’s a hurdle to achieving this, however. It’s a considerable investment in hardware, software and expertise in data management, system integration and project management. Many utilities are reluctant to risk creating such in-house capabilities when they may not realize adequate return on investment from their customer base.
Enter MDMAs
Enter meter data management agents, or MDMAs. Agents are companies that have created infrastructures to manage tremendous volumes of energy data. They’re banking on economies of scale to make their investments pay off by offering data management to utilities as a costeffective turnkey service. Agents, or data managers, generally are independent of utilities, and to ensure their services provide accurate data, they must meet rigorous qualifications to be certified—a benchmark recognizing their meter data management expertise. Knowing certification requirements is in the best interests of energy providers, users and others in the energy distribution channel.
That begs the question. What exactly is good data management? It involves gathering, validating, editing and estimating energy data to ensure its accuracy.
Gathering data requires a process that is compatible with a multiplicity of meters and metering technologies ranging across geographic areas, from utility to utility and even within a single utility. The process must accommodate a variety of automated meter reading configurations, including a host of communications platforms spanning landline telephones, radio frequency collectors, cell phones and communications satellites.
The ABCs of Accuracy
Validating data compares actual meter dial readings to pulses or previous energy usage patterns to current profile information. Meter data managers ensure that the pulse data is consistent with metered measurements. They confirm that metered information is time synchronized.
One MDMA, MeterSmartTM, of Arlington, Texas, uses National Observatory time as its benchmark. It can identify when meter time clocks begin drifting and correct the problem. Utilities set their own thresholds for error that data managers follow, but up to two minutes is fairly typical.
Some of the checks that data managers make include looking for high and low energy spikes as potential indicators of error. The managers compare the data by interval, whether it’s 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, and to historical records for other like time frames, usually the previous week, previous month and the same month a year ago. Unusual readings flag the data for closer inspection.
Editing data entails scanning it for pulse values that may have been introduced into the data record by testing or other activity. The objective is to ensure the data reflects customer’s actual energy use.
Estimating data, similar to validating it, requires comparing records to those of previous time frames.
Throughout the data management process, the goal is to ensure data accuracy and reliability. Accuracy is making sure that what the meter reads are translated properly into values that are sent to the data management center for processing. Quality data processing procedures to accomplish this are critical since a decimal error can mean thousands of dollars in unnecessary extra charges to utility customers, or thousands of dollars in lost revenue to utilities.
Reliability depends on proper operation of system components, such as the meter that measures energy use and the communications platform that transmits the data. A wireless communications failure, for example, hampers data reliability. An example might be where a meter is installed in an exposed open space, such as loading dock. If the meter happens to be hit in the process of the everyday business, it would be rendered it inoperable. This would make data delivery unreliable indeed.
The entire data management process is regulated by each state. Rules may vary, but by and large they are similar from state to state. The goal is a common one, however: make sure the data that the data manager submits to the utility and customer for review conforms to state rules, or province if in Canada.
The Path to Certification
Getting certified as an MDMA means following a different path for the most part in each state, but typical requirements include demonstrated ability to validate, edit and transmit data, a strong disaster recovery system, and straightforward training procedures.
In California, for example, the California Public Utility Commission exercises oversight responsibility for what is considered one of the nation’s most rigorous MDMA certification processes. Each of the Utility Distribution Companies in California participate in the certification process. They are responsible for stringently testing data management practices and procedures. Each utility conducts its tests separately and provides its seal of approval.
One utility provides data managers with meter data from the late 1990’s. Another requires data managers to create their own data and the third provides current data. The tests include overlaying the data sets with weather data (temperature) for the respective time frames. In Illinois, the process is similar, but is managed by the state’s Commerce Commission. In Canada, an organization called Measurement Canada sets the minimum requirements for MDMA certification. Utilities may include their own requirements as part of the evaluation process.
Beyond evaluating data management expertise, the states examine data managers’ overall capabilities. Business location, depth and breadth of business systems that support MDMA functions, satellite offices and detailed information on staffing are some of the information required for review.
Managing Disasters
The certification process pays particular attention to how data managers have organized themselves to manage disasters. They must identify personnel in their organization who are contacts in the event of a disaster and describe their recovery systems, including equipment spares, internal and external communications links, telecommunications links, WAN/LAN, etc. Data managers must provide the location of such "hot site" or redundant systems as security, power, remote access, backup polices, system replicating and mirroring.
They also must explain how they would handle "worst case" situations. Bottom line, data managers must show that no matter the extent of disaster, they would be able to secure meter data and provide ready access to it. A typical MDMA Disaster Recovery Plan should include the items listed in Table 1 to be considered complete.
Table 1: Disaster Recovery
A complete MDMA Disaster Recovery Plan should include procedures for managing items like those listed in the table.
Typical minimum standards of availability and security include providing the past 12 months of historical consumption data within five days of a request. Hardware and software platforms must be scalable to meet any throughput and connectivity performance requirements. Data managers must have Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) or other security mechanism to protect data when it’s transmitted from their MDMA servers to utilities or customers via common carrier. Data must be protected from unauthorized access by a firewall, encryption or other security measures. Security measures also must prevent unauthorized physical access to the data processing center.
Deregulation and Data Management
Not surprisingly, energy market dynamics can affect meter data management. One dynamic in particular, deregulation, had a dramatic impact. Market deregulation heightened the need to manage meter data better because the promise of lower utility bills raised customer expectations. Unfortunately, customers in many cases didn’t have comprehensive load profiles of their energy consumption and demand.
The value of load profiles is considerable. They allow customers to compare current energy consumption and demand patterns to historical energy and weather data, which can identify trends or anomalies. Customers can conduct "what if" scenarios that aggregate loads of a number of facilities in an effort to qualify for better volume discounts on their energy rates.
Load profiles also enable customers to identify and correct operational problems. By establishing energy consumption benchmarks for major equipment, such as chillers, customers can quickly identify when equipment needs maintenance, or is about to fail, based on its changing energy consumption profile.
Power-intensive commercial and industrial firms like pharmaceutical manufacturers, hotels and food processing plants are learning that lesson well. They’re finding that staggering start times for energy-intensive equipment or gradually "soft starting" the equipment can avert setting new energy demand peaks. Setting new peaks can boost energy bills for up to a year, regardless of how effectively a company reduces its consumption. Demand charges can represent 40 percent or more of a company’s energy bill so managing demand is good business.
It’s clear that the upside of meter data management for customers is huge. So valuable are the benefits that utilities can sell meter data management as a service or offer it at no charge to large customers as a customer retention tool.
Data Management Elements
To be accepted by both utilities and their customers, experience shows that energy data management needs to encompass:
Besides helping customers, load profiles that are established and maintained by accurate meter data management also benefit utilities. Energy providers have more pricing options when they know whether or not they will need to purchase high-priced energy to meet demand during hot summer months.
Another benefit is monitoring meter operation. Collecting interval data every 15 minutes or even every day quickly identifies meter malfunctions and minimizes the time frames that energy use would need to be estimated. Estimating use for some part of a 24-hour time frame is far preferable to estimating use for some part of a month or more as is the case when meter data is read manually.
Sharyland Utilities in southern Texas is a good example of a utility applying interval data management to its entire customer base. One commercial customer used the information to identify a spike in demand at an office building during a day when demand should have been low. An investigation showed that a cleaning crew that had been shampooing carpets turned down the air conditioning temperature for comfort and boosted the hot water temperature for carpet cleaning.
Working with certified meter data managers offers a measure of comfort to utilities and their customers. It assures a level of expertise and professionalism, a good procedural process and, ultimately, accurate meter data management. But that’s only the beginning.
As customers learn its full benefits and how they can make the data work for them, they develop insights into their energy consumption and demand patterns. Their knowledge becomes ‘energy intelligence,’ a sustainable competitive edge that minimizes their operational costs. That’s what makes meter data management a potent tool for utilities and customers alike.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vance Hall - Vice President
– Business Development
Previous to working for MeterSmart, Mr. Hall founded Utility Data Resource Inc. (UDRI) in 1995 and sold UDRI to MeterSmart in 2001. Before starting UDRI Mr. Hall worked as Manager of Load Research and Demand Side Management for Utility Translation Systems (UTS), now part of Itron, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before joining UTS, Mr. Hall was Load Research Manager at Texas Utilities (now TXU) in Dallas, Texas for 6 years, and in executive management at Iowa Electric Power and Light (now part of Alliant Utilities) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for 22 years.
Mr. Hall is an expert in interval data retrieval systems and load research/load profiling program design and analysis. He also has significant industry experience in automated meter reading systems (AMR), utility billing administration, load control and real-time pricing systems, generation and transmission planning and load forecasting. Mr. Hall provides senior level management and guidance to MeterSmart. Mr. Hall has presented numerous papers at conferences and served as an instructor on various training courses.
It’s one of their most powerful resources, yet remains underutilized. It’s information about their customers’ energy consumption and demand patterns.
Using customer energy information gives utilities the opportunity to build unprecedented business-to-business and business-to-consumer demographic profiles, an important driver in marketing to energy customers.
Readily available accurate, reliable and timely information about how and when customers use energy can enable utilities to help customers manage their energy consumption more efficiently. It can facilitate load shedding and suggest improvements in operational procedures. Ultimately, using energy information intelligently can help retain customers, especially in deregulated areas.
But that’s not all.
Besides satisfying customers, energy information also can help utilities. Short- and long-term load management and planning, distribution planning, outage management and demand response programs all can benefit from analyzing customers’ energy information. It can produce valuable insights that can help streamline billing and create revenue generating value-added services.
Utilities can create Time of Use and other rates to encourage customers to use energy when it’s less expensive for utilities to provide it. Properly designed rates might generate less revenue, but they drive down cost of service, driving up profit.
The keystone to realizing all this potential is to frequently gather the energy data from meters, ensure its integrity and present it as actionable, customer-specific load profiles. The profiles need to be in an understandable and ‘massageable’ format that utilities and customers can use efficiently.
There’s a hurdle to achieving this, however. It’s a considerable investment in hardware, software and expertise in data management, system integration and project management. Many utilities are reluctant to risk creating such in-house capabilities when they may not realize adequate return on investment from their customer base.
Enter MDMAs
Enter meter data management agents, or MDMAs. Agents are companies that have created infrastructures to manage tremendous volumes of energy data. They’re banking on economies of scale to make their investments pay off by offering data management to utilities as a costeffective turnkey service. Agents, or data managers, generally are independent of utilities, and to ensure their services provide accurate data, they must meet rigorous qualifications to be certified—a benchmark recognizing their meter data management expertise. Knowing certification requirements is in the best interests of energy providers, users and others in the energy distribution channel.
That begs the question. What exactly is good data management? It involves gathering, validating, editing and estimating energy data to ensure its accuracy.
Gathering data requires a process that is compatible with a multiplicity of meters and metering technologies ranging across geographic areas, from utility to utility and even within a single utility. The process must accommodate a variety of automated meter reading configurations, including a host of communications platforms spanning landline telephones, radio frequency collectors, cell phones and communications satellites.
The ABCs of Accuracy
Validating data compares actual meter dial readings to pulses or previous energy usage patterns to current profile information. Meter data managers ensure that the pulse data is consistent with metered measurements. They confirm that metered information is time synchronized.
One MDMA, MeterSmartTM, of Arlington, Texas, uses National Observatory time as its benchmark. It can identify when meter time clocks begin drifting and correct the problem. Utilities set their own thresholds for error that data managers follow, but up to two minutes is fairly typical.
Some of the checks that data managers make include looking for high and low energy spikes as potential indicators of error. The managers compare the data by interval, whether it’s 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, and to historical records for other like time frames, usually the previous week, previous month and the same month a year ago. Unusual readings flag the data for closer inspection.
Editing data entails scanning it for pulse values that may have been introduced into the data record by testing or other activity. The objective is to ensure the data reflects customer’s actual energy use.
Estimating data, similar to validating it, requires comparing records to those of previous time frames.
Throughout the data management process, the goal is to ensure data accuracy and reliability. Accuracy is making sure that what the meter reads are translated properly into values that are sent to the data management center for processing. Quality data processing procedures to accomplish this are critical since a decimal error can mean thousands of dollars in unnecessary extra charges to utility customers, or thousands of dollars in lost revenue to utilities.
Reliability depends on proper operation of system components, such as the meter that measures energy use and the communications platform that transmits the data. A wireless communications failure, for example, hampers data reliability. An example might be where a meter is installed in an exposed open space, such as loading dock. If the meter happens to be hit in the process of the everyday business, it would be rendered it inoperable. This would make data delivery unreliable indeed.
The entire data management process is regulated by each state. Rules may vary, but by and large they are similar from state to state. The goal is a common one, however: make sure the data that the data manager submits to the utility and customer for review conforms to state rules, or province if in Canada.
The Path to Certification
Getting certified as an MDMA means following a different path for the most part in each state, but typical requirements include demonstrated ability to validate, edit and transmit data, a strong disaster recovery system, and straightforward training procedures.
In California, for example, the California Public Utility Commission exercises oversight responsibility for what is considered one of the nation’s most rigorous MDMA certification processes. Each of the Utility Distribution Companies in California participate in the certification process. They are responsible for stringently testing data management practices and procedures. Each utility conducts its tests separately and provides its seal of approval.
One utility provides data managers with meter data from the late 1990’s. Another requires data managers to create their own data and the third provides current data. The tests include overlaying the data sets with weather data (temperature) for the respective time frames. In Illinois, the process is similar, but is managed by the state’s Commerce Commission. In Canada, an organization called Measurement Canada sets the minimum requirements for MDMA certification. Utilities may include their own requirements as part of the evaluation process.
Beyond evaluating data management expertise, the states examine data managers’ overall capabilities. Business location, depth and breadth of business systems that support MDMA functions, satellite offices and detailed information on staffing are some of the information required for review.
Managing Disasters
The certification process pays particular attention to how data managers have organized themselves to manage disasters. They must identify personnel in their organization who are contacts in the event of a disaster and describe their recovery systems, including equipment spares, internal and external communications links, telecommunications links, WAN/LAN, etc. Data managers must provide the location of such "hot site" or redundant systems as security, power, remote access, backup polices, system replicating and mirroring.
They also must explain how they would handle "worst case" situations. Bottom line, data managers must show that no matter the extent of disaster, they would be able to secure meter data and provide ready access to it. A typical MDMA Disaster Recovery Plan should include the items listed in Table 1 to be considered complete.
Table 1: Disaster Recovery
- Temporary power failure
- Extended power outage
- Minor network issues
- Major network failure
- Server shutdown
- Low-, medium- and high-level general emergencies
- Major equipment failures
- Software failure due to virus or system bug
- Regional disasters
- Fire
- Major storms
- Events that would hamper physical access to the primary site
A complete MDMA Disaster Recovery Plan should include procedures for managing items like those listed in the table.
Typical minimum standards of availability and security include providing the past 12 months of historical consumption data within five days of a request. Hardware and software platforms must be scalable to meet any throughput and connectivity performance requirements. Data managers must have Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) or other security mechanism to protect data when it’s transmitted from their MDMA servers to utilities or customers via common carrier. Data must be protected from unauthorized access by a firewall, encryption or other security measures. Security measures also must prevent unauthorized physical access to the data processing center.
Deregulation and Data Management
Not surprisingly, energy market dynamics can affect meter data management. One dynamic in particular, deregulation, had a dramatic impact. Market deregulation heightened the need to manage meter data better because the promise of lower utility bills raised customer expectations. Unfortunately, customers in many cases didn’t have comprehensive load profiles of their energy consumption and demand.
The value of load profiles is considerable. They allow customers to compare current energy consumption and demand patterns to historical energy and weather data, which can identify trends or anomalies. Customers can conduct "what if" scenarios that aggregate loads of a number of facilities in an effort to qualify for better volume discounts on their energy rates.
Load profiles also enable customers to identify and correct operational problems. By establishing energy consumption benchmarks for major equipment, such as chillers, customers can quickly identify when equipment needs maintenance, or is about to fail, based on its changing energy consumption profile.
Power-intensive commercial and industrial firms like pharmaceutical manufacturers, hotels and food processing plants are learning that lesson well. They’re finding that staggering start times for energy-intensive equipment or gradually "soft starting" the equipment can avert setting new energy demand peaks. Setting new peaks can boost energy bills for up to a year, regardless of how effectively a company reduces its consumption. Demand charges can represent 40 percent or more of a company’s energy bill so managing demand is good business.
It’s clear that the upside of meter data management for customers is huge. So valuable are the benefits that utilities can sell meter data management as a service or offer it at no charge to large customers as a customer retention tool.
Data Management Elements
To be accepted by both utilities and their customers, experience shows that energy data management needs to encompass:
- Easily accessible Web-based "dashboards" that display and help customers analyze their energy data,
- E-mail alerts, including a wireless option, that signal customers when their energy consumption or demand is about to exceed threshold levels,
- Robust connections to the Internet for transferring data,
- Fully redundant, "hot" backup servers to ensure seamless operating efficiency in the event of a disaster; and
- Distributed communications systems so that if servers in one location fail, data transfer can continue from other locations.
Besides helping customers, load profiles that are established and maintained by accurate meter data management also benefit utilities. Energy providers have more pricing options when they know whether or not they will need to purchase high-priced energy to meet demand during hot summer months.
Another benefit is monitoring meter operation. Collecting interval data every 15 minutes or even every day quickly identifies meter malfunctions and minimizes the time frames that energy use would need to be estimated. Estimating use for some part of a 24-hour time frame is far preferable to estimating use for some part of a month or more as is the case when meter data is read manually.
Sharyland Utilities in southern Texas is a good example of a utility applying interval data management to its entire customer base. One commercial customer used the information to identify a spike in demand at an office building during a day when demand should have been low. An investigation showed that a cleaning crew that had been shampooing carpets turned down the air conditioning temperature for comfort and boosted the hot water temperature for carpet cleaning.
Working with certified meter data managers offers a measure of comfort to utilities and their customers. It assures a level of expertise and professionalism, a good procedural process and, ultimately, accurate meter data management. But that’s only the beginning.
As customers learn its full benefits and how they can make the data work for them, they develop insights into their energy consumption and demand patterns. Their knowledge becomes ‘energy intelligence,’ a sustainable competitive edge that minimizes their operational costs. That’s what makes meter data management a potent tool for utilities and customers alike.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vance Hall - Vice President
– Business Development
Previous to working for MeterSmart, Mr. Hall founded Utility Data Resource Inc. (UDRI) in 1995 and sold UDRI to MeterSmart in 2001. Before starting UDRI Mr. Hall worked as Manager of Load Research and Demand Side Management for Utility Translation Systems (UTS), now part of Itron, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before joining UTS, Mr. Hall was Load Research Manager at Texas Utilities (now TXU) in Dallas, Texas for 6 years, and in executive management at Iowa Electric Power and Light (now part of Alliant Utilities) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for 22 years.
Mr. Hall is an expert in interval data retrieval systems and load research/load profiling program design and analysis. He also has significant industry experience in automated meter reading systems (AMR), utility billing administration, load control and real-time pricing systems, generation and transmission planning and load forecasting. Mr. Hall provides senior level management and guidance to MeterSmart. Mr. Hall has presented numerous papers at conferences and served as an instructor on various training courses.
