I had the opportunity to meet with some of my friends at one of the local coops this past week. We got into the discussion about AMI and some of the benefits of having a system in place. This past month the manager of finance was looking at usage by substation and decided to put together a Excel spreadsheet and graph showing line loss by substation. Finance had always looked at system line losses but those losses were inconsistent month to month. The reason for the inconsistency was due to the fact the meter readings at the substations was not coincidental to the field readings and the individual customer readings occurred throughout the month. Now with the AMI system deployed they read all of the meters on the same day each month, giving them consistent information.
Putting the readings together by substation along with the substation usage the finance manager could quickly see how each substation was performing in terms of line loss. What jumped out to her was that two substations in particular had significantly higher losses than the others. She presented her report to the General Manager who in turn shared the report with the board of directors. This prompted the organization to begin to look at those two substations more closely to see if they can determine what is at the root of those losses.
As utilities go into an AMI project they typically have some very specific ideas about what information they want to use and how they intend to use it. What is exciting about AMI today is that it is constantly evolving and what we thought we knew about what we wanted to gain from having a system in place may be different than what we ultimately use the system for as we progress. It's kinda like Donald Rumsfeld once said; "what we don't know is what we don't know", or in other words, we will have a lot to learn about the possibilities AMI will provide us and who in the utility (including customers) might have access to the information and how they might use it.
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