by Angela Guess
Sunil Soares recently outlined four data governance best practices that can be used by utility companies to better capitalize on their smart meter data. Soares states, “Over the past five years, utilities have been early drivers of big data analytics, largely through regional smart meter projects where it’s been proven that sensors can be used to easily capture and share energy usage data to be analyzed by consumers.”
He adds, “Since North American utilities started rolling out smart meters across facilities, they have been able to capture usage data every 15 to 60 minutes for residential and commercial customers, and communicate this information on a daily basis to the utility for billing and analytics. This compares greatly to the traditional electricity and gas meters, where data usage was only read on a monthly or quarterly basis, and was only measured via gross consumption and offered no insight into when the energy was actually consumed.”
Soares notes, “Today, smart meters enable utilities to offer differentiated billing to customers such as lower rates during off-peak hours and higher rates during peak hours. With differentiated billing, utilities can develop pricing plans encouraging customers to reduce usage during peak hours. This allows utilities to reduce generation capacity if they can manage peak customer demand.”
Read Soares’ four practices for improving smart meter data here.
