Main Menu1/26/2005
Texas has always been big in energy. Oil built many of the beautiful tall buildings in Midland, Houston and Dallas but the future of energy management and efficiency is on the walls of even the most modest homes, outbuildings and mechanical equipment.
UtiliPoint® International research on AMR (automatic meter reading) and AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) markets shows that about 40 percent of the 1.6 million co-operative meters in Texas are read using the power line carrier technology provided by DCSI and Hunt Technologies. While most investor-owned utilities in the Texas market are still evaluating AMI and have yet to convince themselves of the utility and electricity consumer benefits of AMI, the electric co-operatives are a different story. Throughout agrarian Texas, co-operatives have been using AMI to great effect for a variety of functions including monitoring for outages at unmanned irrigation sites.
In Idaho, Idaho Power has been working with farmers to reduce irrigation on hot summer afternoons. The first plan was to have irrigators avoid certain days of the week. Some irrigators complied, but many did not want to go for a day without irrigating their crops, particularly when it was very hot. Idaho Power then proposed that the irrigators be divided into two groups, one that would irrigate during the morning hours, and another that would irrigate during the afternoon hours. This at least reduced the contribution of irrigation to the afternoon summer peak.
At some point, if Idaho Power were to expand the pilot of the DCSI power line carrier system to its whole territory, the utility would be able to monitor the use of energy for irrigation on an hourly basis and seek additional ways to work with farmers to reduce on-peak usage for irrigation. The utility could also monitor for outages as the co-operatives in Texas are currently doing.
In Texas, the farmers are the bread and butter of the co-operatives, and as such, the co-operatives tend to look at residential load for demand response rather than irrigation load.
In UtiliPoint's® recently completed study on AMR we found that many utilities
see that AMI provides necessary support for the development and rollout of a
variety of time- differentiated rates. The figure below depicts our report's
findings.
The saturation level of the Texas co-operative market for AMR is a little known and highly misunderstood fact. IOUs and municipal utilities have been asking UtiliPoint® for information about AMI success stories, often with the misconception that few utilities in the United States have created an adequate business case for AMR and AMI investment, or have deployed AMR and AMI well. To the contrary, UtiliPoint® has a number of solid business case models and is well on its way to developing a reference model for the industry.
Rural Texas co-operative utilities are far from being alone. Across North America including Oregon, Kansas, Idaho, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, AMR and AMI investment is creating tremendous value for utilities and electric consumers. For example, Wisconsin Public Service recently reported to AMRA that it has saved $1 per customer per outage by eliminating the need to call customers after power was restored. The utility simply “pings” the meters. Philadelphia Power and Light reported that it has reduced estimated bills from an average of 4 to 6 percent per month to less than 1 percent as a result of the largest two-way AMI installation by an electric utility.
AMR and AMI and the associated business process of meter data
management are truly important technologies and business decision platforms
that are woefully misunderstood and highly undervalued in the investor-owned
market. It's time for AMR/AMI to shine. The rewards will go to the utility
executives who recognize that AMR/AMI investment is wholly concomitant with
a “back to basics” strategy that will yield fundamental value
and opportunity to their business in operations efficiency, risk mitigation,
strategic planning and at the bottom line.
