Page 2: Four best practices >>

By Sunil Soares

 

Over the past five years, utilities have been early drivers of big data analytics, largely through regional smart meter projects where it’s been proven that sensors can be used to easily capture and share energy usage data to be analyzed by consumers.   

 

Since North American utilities started rolling out smart meters across facilities, they have been able to capture usage data every 15 to 60 minutes for residential and commercial customers, and communicate this information on a daily basis to the utility for billing and analytics. This compares greatly to the traditional electricity and gas meters, where data usage was only read on a monthly or quarterly basis, and was only measured via gross consumption and offered no insight into when the energy was actually consumed.

 

Today, smart meters enable utilities to offer differentiated billing to customers such as lower rates during off-peak hours and higher rates during peak hours. With differentiated billing, utilities can develop pricing plans encouraging customers to reduce usage during peak hours. This allows utilities to reduce generation capacity if they can manage peak customer demand.

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Between 2009 and 2012, approximately 5 million of Southern California Edison's (SCE) residential and small-business customers are getting new smart meters with Edison SmartConnect, SCE’s smart metering program.  Based on “next-generation” technology, Edison SmartConnect was designed with a focus on the customer.  With millions of meters already deployed to the field, in April 2011, SCE started providing customers with interval data collected by reading the smart meters over a secure, wireless two-way communication system. This system is empowering customers to become better-informed managers of their electricity use through new tools, programs and services that will help them save energy, money, and the environment.

The new meters are smart because they can communicate – not only with the customer about their electricity usage and pricing signals, but they can also communicate with the utility to indicate if there are  fluctuations in power or even accurately pinpoint an outage.  For a utility such as SCE, smart meters are generating a wealth of new information that is fundamentally changing the way we interact with our customers.  Our information management strategy for smart grid starts with an investment in data governance practices and a data warehouse to ensure timely and accurate information is made accessible to our customers.

 - Tom Walker, Southern California Edison, Edison SmartConnect, Director of Business Integration

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