Municipal Electric Utility · Energy & Utilities · Phoenix, AZ · 11 weeks
Smart meter data foundation built for 680K meters
A municipal electric utility installed 680,000 smart meters but only used the data for billing. The interval data sat unused. We developed an analytics system to process this data and launched the utility’s first demand response program. This directly cut capacity costs by $3.4 million in the first summer.
Challenge
The utility collected 15-minute data from 680,000 smart meters, but the data sat locked in a vendor’s system with no way to analyze it. Meanwhile, they spent $2.1 million each year on capacity reserves that a demand response program could reduce. The problem: they couldn’t pinpoint which customers to target or track how well the program worked.
Outcome
In its first year, the demand response program signed up 18,400 customers and cut capacity costs by $3.4 million. Building on smart meter data, we developed four more use cases: spotting non-technical losses, optimizing time-of-use rates, detecting outages, and targeting energy efficiency efforts. Early analysis of non-technical losses uncovered $680,000 in annual revenue leakage.
Results
- $3.4M Avoided capacity costs in first summer
- 18,400 Demand response program enrollments in year one
- $680K Annual revenue leakage identified through loss detection
- 4 Additional analytics use cases enabled by the foundation
We spent $180 million on smart meters but were only using the data for billing. Thinklytics helped us create an analytics system that lets us do more with that data, like demand response, detecting non-technical losses, and a few other things. Just this past summer, we saved $3.4 million by avoiding capacity costs, which was better than we expected.