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NISC’s Meter Data Management Takes Smart Meters to the Next Level
For many utilities across the country, installing smart meters provides a huge boost to operational efficiency. Smart meters reduce the number of crews dispatched to read meters and help reduce the amount of time it takes to catch a meter reporting inaccurate data.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Smart meters are a great way for a utility to be more efficient, but adding a Meter Data Management System (MDMS) multiplies the effectiveness of that smart meter by providing those efficiencies for the utility office and customers.
“MDMS takes (smart meters) to the next level,” said John Alls, NISC MDMS Product Line Manager. “Sure, (utilities) don’t have to roll a truck every time they want to read a meter, but now they can analyze the data, cleanse it, push it to the customer and do time-of-use and critical peak pricing off of it. To me, MDM answers that question of ‘what else can I do?’”
The smart meters are built for capturing and returning data, but MDMS will help cleanse, validate and interpret that data for utility customers and the utility itself.
Sioux Valley Energy (Colman, S.D.), found that by using NISC’s MDMS, they could catch faulty meters within days, as opposed to weeks, of the meter not returning data. Minnesota Valley Electric Cooperative (Jordan, Minn.), has helped educate their customers through NISC’s MDMS analysis tool, Usage & Bill Analysis. Customers can select a date range and see hourly data showing when they are using the most energy, allowing them to cut back on usage or explore different pricing plans that may be more economical. The integration, and the use of innovations such as mobile apps, takes the data from smart meters and, through MDMS, literally puts it in the hands of the customer.
“We wanted a system that allowed us to manage our data in a productive and efficient way,” said Stacey Pierce of Sioux Valley Energy. “Implementing the MDMS allowed us to share the data with our customers. It immediately helped us achieve our goal of educating our members on their electrical patterns and consumption.”
NISC’s MDMS is beneficial for utilities running NISC’s iVUE suite of solutions, as it fully integrates with other products like CIS, Outage Management and Work Management.
“The beauty of it is that if you find malfunctioning meters in MDMS and you want to send somebody out to check it, you can create a service order directly off of MDMS,” Alls said. ”If I get my list and there are four possible meters that I think are busted, I check those four boxes, hit service order and it sends a service order into CIS.”
Since its launch in the fall of 2009, NISC’s MDMS is live at more than 33 sites. NISC has had the opportunity to leverage data from a variety of smart-meter manufacturers including companies like Landis+Gyr, Cooper Power Systems, SmartSynch, Consert, Tantalus, Sensus, Elster and Aclara. Of the sites live on MDMS a little more than half of them have been at utilities using Aclara’s AMI system, this includes both small and large utilities.
“We now have a really good understanding of the obstacles and the hurdles that we’re going to run into, so we can make some really good recommendations and best practices,” Alls said. “A lot of the hard work that would go with an implementation of MDMS is going to be much easier because we’ve done it so many times.”
To learn more about NISC’s MDMS, contact John Alls at john.alls@nisc.coop.
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