ABSTRACT

The way electricity billing information has been collected over the past decades has been labor intensive. Utilities regularly have to dispatch their crews to visit customer premises and record energy usage displayed on electromechanical analog meters. The frequency of getting such data is typically either once or twice each month. While information communication technology has evolved, the ubiquitous sensor network has improved the data collection of billing information. This is typically referred to as automatic meter reading (AMR), as it was first introduced early this century, or AMI which was introduced in recent years. The challenges now are not just the large number of deployments to the sites, but also the maintenance of those IP-based “smart” energy meters that can be cost ineffective. Although some believe that these new cyber infrastructure additions help utilities to better manage their billing information, as a result of improving the accuracy of energy consumption, approximately 60% of customers nationwide (per the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) are still going through the conventional means of data collection.