Asia

Conference: Metering, Billing/CRM India
Location: Mumbai, India
Presenter: Paul Sell
Abstract: Presented by Paul Sell at Metering, Billing/CRM India

In 2007 and early 2008 consultants advising the Ministerial Council on Energy in Australia undertook a comprehensive analysis of the costs and benefits of a national rollout of smart meters.  Energy Market Consulting associates was engaged to undertake the cost analysis for this project.

The project examined the costs and benefits state-by-state and costs were analysed separately for urban, rural and remote consumers.  It examined a range of communications technologies and also examined individually a range of “smart” functionalities, including remote connect and disconnect, supply capacity control, dedicated controlled circuit, quality of supply detection and outage detection.

The findings of the project were that there is likely to be a positive national net benefit.  In some states, however, a worst cost / lowest benefit outcome would lead to a negative net benefit.  The benefits were found to be based to a significant extent on savings in accumulation meter replacements, on meter reading cost savings and on distributor efficiencies which in turn are based largely off the “smart” functionalities.

The presentation will outline the components of the costs, the sources of the benefits and the range of overall net benefits that were assessed.  It will show the extent to which costs were found to be a function of communications technology choice and the range of smart functionalities that were found to have a net benefit.  Finally the paper will comment on some implementation issues, including the challenges of bringing in smart metering under a cost-recovery model for price regulation.

Conference: Metering, Billing/CRM India
Location: Mumbai, India
Presenter: Martin Mc Caffrey
Abstract: Presented by Martin Mc Caffrey at Metering, Billing/CRM India

One of Australia 's  largest electricity distributors has implemented the first large scale automatic restoration system . The business benefits from the system are provided by avoiding customer rebates payable for extended loss of supply.  The business case called for large savings in rebates payable if a system could be implemented to restore many common outages in under a minute as these momentary outages do not incur rebates.   This distributor undertook to implement with Oracle a solution using standard Oracle products and SCADA integration to implement such a system.