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Tasks
A modern meter
reading system not only reads customers’ electric meters, but also provides
data analysis tools, and means of forwarding those data to the department or
company generating customer billing statements (Fig. 1). All these processes
must be streamlined, cost effective, and automated as much as possible.
Types of Data
If one is interested only in
retrieving dial readings once a day, that is good enough for generating billing
data. If, in addition, one can get detailed information such as time of day kWh
usage and demand profiles, then activities such as time of day rate analysis,
true costs estimates, wholesale and retail rate calculations become possible
(see Fig. 2). This enables utility companies to understand how to develop better
retail cost structures, and maximize revenue. NTMC systems are capable of all this by exploiting data recording
capabilities of modern RTUs. Meter resident RTUs gather data at preset intervals
(15 minutes, for example), and the master downloads the data once per day in
early morning hours.
Cost Effectiveness
Meter reading system cost
effectiveness is determined by several factors, including cost of initial
investment, cost of each meter reading before the system was installed, and
increase of revenue generated by the utility company as a result of better
understanding their customers’ demand profiles, and better resulting cost
structures. All but the first of these depend on circumstances at the company
using the system. Initial investment costs can be minimized by employing a
hub-and-spoke arrangement depicted in Fig. 3, where a small number of repeater
RTUs (in blue color) is used to relay meter reading commands to a large number
of less costly meter reading RTUs (in orange color). This approach uses the
proven technology of message routing. The meter resident RTUs can be
relatively close to repeaters thereby reducing their cost.
More
on how MREX, the NTMC meter reading module, implements above can be found
here.
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