AMI to Fix Connectivity Data

Big or small, almost all utilities have a chronic condition – data quality of their network connectivity models is less than desirable. For some, the device associations are inaccurate to the extent of 30 - 40%. In recent years, many utilities have spent tens of millions to physically walk the circuits to verify the connectivity data, but not many (if not any) have sufficiently leveraged the meter events to correct the model.

This, truly, is a low hanging fruit. Correlating meters that throw out power out events with the meters that are associated with the OMS created outage tickets can easily indicate the disassociation. Utilities can adopt a continuous improvement approach to analytically compare these two data-sets to identify the anomalies on a regular basis. This is a “slow and steady” strategy, but that’s the way to win the race at a time when commissions are holding tight to their wallets.

Leveraging AMI for Outage Management

By 2015, over 40 million advanced electric meters will be deployed by the US utilities. A significant number, however, it still makes up for only 25% of all electric customers. The good news is that almost all major IOUs, who are the traditional trend setters in the US electric market, have already dared the devil and are in the last laps of AMI deployment. Time has come to think “so, now, what?” All these utilities had compelling business cases to convince their commissioners, but now, billions of dollars later, the question remains whether they will really be able to offset the customer surcharge by achieving promised efficiency gains.  They have got some really cool toys, petabytes of data and some brilliantly fluffy ideas, - but they still need to figure out how to connect the dots.

I intend to write some fuzzy posts on these fluffy ideas in days (or months) to come, - but here is something that many utilities have already embarked on: enabling outage management process with AMI. There is a wide range of benefits - from instantaneous outage detection to nested outage determination to device analysis - but the biggest saver is the simplest: avoiding dispatch for those 30% to 50% of trouble calls for which there are no utility side issues.

Meter events can be leveraged to automatically determine when a meter suffers an outage and when it wakes back up. AMI systems can process this information, infer the outage and notify the Outage Management System (OMS). Upon restoration, OMS can auto-verify the restoration status by requesting AMI and detect nested outages, if any.

Implementation mechanics will vary largely depending on specific AMI technologies, but what I found thrillingly fascinating is the possibility that Meter Data Management Systems (MDMS), as they mature, will act as virtual Distribution SCADA. When it comes to outage notification, there is a huge hiatus between a SCADA-sensed breaker and a Customer-notified site – any intermediate fault location has to wait to be determined by the OMS. This gap can be potentially bridged by MDMS by utilizing the network connectivity model against the meter events. So far, most MDM vendors have been shaky about encroaching into the prohibited space of OMS, - but time will tell.

A Case for Channel Strategy around 3rd Parties

When the Groupon effect toppling regimes around the world and iphone apps attempting to aid confessions for catholics, some utilities are still mooning on how to integrate internet and mobile in their comprehensive channel strategy. [Bit of a out-of-context stat – internet penetration in Egypt and Tunisia are 21% and 34% respectively, compared to 77% in the US (according to www.internetworldstats.com)].

Here is one more case for channel strategy.

In my tiny town with the population of 205K, there are 23 (mini-) firms dealing in energy efficiency – Energy conservation consulting, Energy conservation products and services, Insulation materials, Appliance installers, Builders and so on. If you survey the entire territory of a major utility, there are hundreds of such firms. These companies want to be found by the customers, and if possible, when they focus on their core service areas, they would want someone to handle their billing and payment functions.

Utilities have a tremendous opportunity to facilitate the relationship between these companies with the customers. When the utility websites can have their listings, utilities can insource their billing and payment capabilities to support these firms. Revenue model? – that’s a no brainer.