Telvent - Making the Most of Your Advanced Metering Infrastructure Investment
Going beyond billing, the millions of data points now flowing into utilities from the advanced metering infrastructure can improve business operations across the board.
An article by Marc Jones, Smart Grid product team manager for Telvent
According to the "2012 Smart Grid Executive Survey" from Zpryme Research and Consulting, more than 52 million smart meters will be installed in the United States by the end of 2012, signaling an industry-wide expansion of the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). Smart meters already are feeding hundreds of thousands of readings per day to utilities, providing critical data in near real-time.
To utilize this data and cope with the number of data points flowing in, at the end of every AMI is a meter data management (MDM) system, serving as the central information depot. These powerful solutions perform critical validation, estimation and editing (VEE) functions before sending data on the utility's customer information system (CIS), ensuring the accuracy and timeliness of billing. This has been the principle function of MDM systems for some time.
The wealth of data generated by the AMI, however, provides an encyclopedia of information to utilities on how customers use electricity and when they use it, offering insight to a utility's entire enterprise, beyond just accurate billing. A large amount of valuable information is currently being left on the table.
Here, we focus on how innovations in MDM solutions, integrated across utilities' enterprises, are now offering a new doorway to better business and customer service.
Data Storage and Analytics
A core feature to extracting the most value from the AMI is a single, secure database where the millions of data points being collected from multiple sources can be stored. From there, data can be queried by the analytic calculation engines in the MDM system, developing trends and insights that support key business operations and may be critical for future infrastructure or distribution planning.
This database allows the MDM system to provide highly precise VEE functions because it can draw from strong historical data to check data integrity, identify missing readings and replace any missing data with accurate estimates. When estimation fails, the MDM system will issue a re-read request, quickly identifying meters exhibiting abnormal functioning and can determine the appropriate action.
A database also provides a location to store meter-read data and data provided by the other enterprise solutions that make up the smart grid suite: the geographic information system (GIS) geodatabse, distribution management system, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and outage management system. The MDM system can then integrate this data to add value and improve functions of nearly all business operations.
Outage Management Enhancement
With near real-time readings arriving from meters, MDM systems quickly identify meters that are returning last gasp messages, signifying a potential power outage. Integration with an outage management system (OMS) provides the enhanced processing power and advanced prediction algorithms to accurately identify events registered by the MDM system as outages and rapidly determine the scope.
Conversely, the MDM system can provide critical information to the OMS that adds to its overall value, such as providing event notifications from non-meter devices higher on the network. This allows the OMS to prioritize those events and identify incident locations more rapidly through downstream events.
The MDM system can also help in the verification of outage status because it can receive information and actively ping meters to determine their power status. This helps utilities prevent overprediction of outages and identify nested outages during restoration,providing critical information to the on-site restoration crews and reducing additional trips into the field.
Preventing Operational and Business Network LossesAMI and MDM implementation also reduces truck rolls into the field for everyday meter readings because readings are automatically taken on a regular basis in near real time. Meter technicians, unfortunately, are also the first line of defense against theft, providing monthly field inspections of the meters. Without these monthly inspections, that defense is greatly reduced.New MDM systems fill this void with built-in analysis tools to detect possible theft or tampering. By analyzing real-time data and comparing it to historical trends from the same meter or similar customers, MDM systems can identify patterns likely to suggest theft and tampering, and automatically generate a work report for the revenue department and field teams to investigate.In addition, the integration of the MDM system with SCADA or distribution management systems (DMS) also allows for aggregate comparisons between the energy supply and demand load, helping identify potential theft or network loss. The MDM system, for example,can aggregate usage data from all the meters tied to a specific feeder station and compare those figures to the power delivered to that station. If the aggregated usage figures are significantly less, that may signal the utility of potential theft or network loss during transmission.