Carbon-Pros Analyst Blog

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Meter Data Management (MDM) handle the greatly increased volume and complexity of meter data. AMI supports all phases of the meter-data life cycle from acquisition to provisioning to providing customers with usage information. Instead of monthly readings, AMI provides periodic readings around the clock. AMI must meet stringent requirements for data latency, persistence, and scalability of energy consumption data. AMI functions span both the IT data center and grid operations and is an important enabler of the smart grid.

MDM applications support the loading, validation, editing, and estimation of meter data. Due to the very high volumes of data logged by smart meters (as often as 15 minute intervals), new MDM applications must achieve high levels of scalability. In the Austin Energy roll-out of 500,000 meters with 15 minute sampling, the annual storage requirement went up 10X to 200TB. This is roughly 400MB per meter per year. Pacific Gas & Electric is sampling twice per day and is adding storage to accommodate 170MB per meter per year.

Smart metering can aid utilities in optimizing revenue by providing alerts that detect idle usage and energy theft. Theft costs utilities about 1-3 percent of revenue or about $6 billion across the industry. Analytical functions can extract information from interval data and translate it into reports for trigger appropriate proactive actions. MDM may include functions such as:

• Connections to meter systems
• Meter data validation, estimation, and editing (VEE)
• Error handling
• Meter data access
• Meter inventory management
• Usage analytics
• Information delivery to customer portals

In terms of today's market, AMI/MDM are red hot. In its September 2009 Assessment Report, FERC estimates that there are 7.95 million advanced meters deployed in the U.S. Under their Business-as-Usual scenario FERC estimates there will be about 80 million smart meters installed by 2019. Under their full-deployment scenario, FERC estimates there will be about 141 million installed by 2019. With the disclaimer that an accurate forecast was outside the scope of the assessment, FERC goes on to say that “the partial deployment scenario is probably closer to what might actually occur.” If so, that averages to about 7 million new smart meters per year for the ten years 2010-29. That's a lot of smart meters and even more data storage.

Sources:
meter data volumes: Smart Grid News
smart meter estimate: FERC Aug-09 report on Demand Response