How to cut gas costs? Salt River says, 'Data management'
With gas prices approaching $4 per gallon in the US, what wouldn’t you give to drastically cut down your mileage these days? One Arizona utility has found it’s been able to avoid more than two million miles of driving on service calls — saving some 198,000 gallons in fuel consumption — with the help of smart-meter data management.
The Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, SRP for short, estimates it has also saved more than 401,000 labour hours and remotely addressed more than 1.2 million service orders with the help of Elster’s EnergyAxis solution.
SRP now plans to extend its smart-grid deployment with Elster’s EnergyICT EIServer meter data management (MDM) solution. The solution will be rolled out to manage more than 900,000 planned advanced metering devices in Elster’s EnergyAxis system throughout the utility’s service territory.
According to Elster, meter data management helps SRP generate the intelligence it needs to make more informed energy management and pricing decisions, enhance operational processes and deliver advanced customer services.
EnergyICT’s MDM and network management solution will perform detailed smart meter data analysis on information collected from every Elster AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) endpoint, providing additional benefits to SRP’s customers, including flexible pricing strategies in the form of time-of-use (TOU).
The MDM deployment will also enable SRP to benefit from work-flow management to integrate processes and data, improved sampling and expanded data options for load research, more accurate forecasting to improve power buy and sell decisions, real-time data processing, asset optimisation and demand response. Now under way, the implementation of the system is expected to be complete this July.
Since 2003, SRP has taken a lead in smart-meter and smart-grid improvements, with several consumer initiatives that have won it honours from J.D. Power and Associates for customer satisfaction in business and residential electric service. In October 2009, the US Department of Energy awarded a matching grant to SRP under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s SGIG initiative to help further its smart-grid deployment.
SRP was EnergyICT’s first AMI deployment in the US. EnergyICT was acquired by the Elster Group in October 2009 and has offices in Belgium, France, UK, Germany and US.
