Meter Data Management for Public Utilities

• User- and mobile-friendly interface for accessing all customer account, billing and metering information. Users can review daily consumption charts and graphs, as well as perform connect/disconnect on the meter. Employees get a centralized view of all relevant account information.
• Allow customers to track usage patterns more closely, review historical usage, review the effects of temperature on their utility costs, manage online budgets and gain much needed control over their ultimate cost for these services.
• Quickly group and apportion energy consumption from a number of meters, and supports multiple aggregation methods for water, gas and electric meters; transformer, feeder, substation, hierarchical, rate class, zip code, etc.
• Precise validation, editing, and estimation standards to fill in gaps and missing reads to resolve data exceptions. Processes interval data and create custom VEE rules and multiple rule-set combinations and verify missing intervals with outage history or disconnect status for interval data validation.
• Near real-time notifications of alerts via email or text massaging of meter events, analytic events, workflow exceptions and system status. Summary reports can be delivered daily, weekly or monthly via email.
• Resolve customer usage issues and understand their usage patterns by analyzing operational data on the fly for different system configurations. Generate graphs of billing history usage, virtual meters, interval readings, and SCADA data.
• Provides a central location for users to access, interact, and analyze up-to-date information so they can make smarter, data-driven decisions. Dashboards can be configured and saved for individual users.
• Versatile weather data importing and displays in various charts/graphs when users view customer consumption data.
• Broker controls to third-party prepay systems to meet customer demand for prepay services.
• ElectSolve™ helps the billing system accommodate unusual rate structures associated with large power customers.

Identifying issues with the AMI network can be a daunting task with the large volume of data coming back from smart meters. Understanding where and why these problems are occurring is key to improving performance and ensuring AMI reliability. ElectSolve™ analyzes AMI performance statistics to identify invalid meter reads. This helps utilities diagnose and correct problems to improve metering performance.

Data analysis is important for utility revenue protection. ElectSolve™ helps identify and locate non-technical losses caused by meter tamping or equipment problems. It checks for negative consumption to identify meters with potential theft. It also analyzes meters that have consumption on inactive accounts, and meters without consumption on active accounts where consumption is expected.

Smart meters can generate hundreds of different types of meter events such as blinks, tampers, outages, hot-socket, low battery alarm, and power quality events. ElectSolve™ consumes event data and transforms it into actionable intelligence to improve operational efficiencies and deliver enhanced levels of customer service.

ElectSolve™ provides load profiles for individual customers and customer groups, helping utilities design rate plans and demand response programs. Customer Service Representatives can quickly reference the same charts and graphs their customers see on the web portal to quickly resolve customer problems. Helping customers understand their usage pattern and the impact of weather is key to providing enhanced customer service.

Identifies the location of voltage exceptions and provide alarms and reports from the data collected. Voltage profiles can be plotted for both single and poly-phase meters. It can be used to monitor bellwether meters for end-of-line or conservation voltage reduction applications. It can also be used to identify phase imbalance on transformer-rated meters, helping utilities protect against lost revenue.

ElectSolve™ provides a comprehensive view of line losses, reconciling wholesale purchases with power sales down to the substation, feeder and phase. It identifies where losses are occurring to help the utility recover lost revenue and increase the efficiency of the distribution system.

Water conservation is a serious consideration for utilities and end-use customers. ElectSolve™ can facilitate conservation of unaccounted-for water loss by systematically reconciling plant water production with metered water delivery. Utilities can notify customers of a possible on-premise leak through continuous consumption analysis.

Smart meters can provide data for improving outage management. ElectSolve™ analyzes meter outage events, plotting location and outage duration. It reconciles the meter outage data with the outage management system to ensure the customer account information is correct. Timely and accurate outage detection leads to improved power system reliability indices such as SAIDI, CAIDI, etc.

A distribution transformer failure results in an immediate outage that can be expensive for both the utility and the customer. ElectSolve™ uses sophisticated software algorithms to solve calculate the transformer load to generate load profiles. It identifies overloaded transformers that might result in failure, and underloaded transformers for better asset utilization.