The Smart Grid for an Integrated Multi-Service Utility

Abstract— City of Tallahassee faces the challenges of implementing not only a Demand Side Management program to foster energy efficiency, but also an industry-first integrated Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Meter Data Management System (MDMS) for electric, gas, water, and other City services. The City vision and implementation experience will be discussed,Index Terms – Demand Response, Demand Side Management, Advanced Metering Infrastructure, Smart Metering, Meter Data Management, Customer PresentmentI.B ACKGROUNDReliable, high quality utility services at an affordable price -- that is what the City of Tallahassee believes its citizens deserve. The City maintains a municipal utility system to achieve this goal. A municipal utility is owned, managed and operated by the people who best know a community's needs and values: its citizens themselves. That is why the City of Tallahassee uses the title "Your Own Utilities" to identity its utility services. Employees are residents of the community who run the utility and are also its customers. Customers serve customers. The emphasis remains on the quality of service to the community. When Tallahassee citizens pay their utility bills, they are adding to the quality of their community's life. Their money covers more that just the cost of utility services.It also helps fund other City services such as the Parks and Recreation and Police departments.The City Commission is ultimately responsible for Tallahassee's utility system, aided by various appointed officials. Commissioners serve at the discretion of community voters, and make their decisions about the management of the utility in open, public meetings. This assures citizens that they have a voice in the management of their utility system. They also have easy access to fellow citizens with whom they may discuss any questions or complaints they have about their utility service.II.A MI AND D EMAND S IDE M ANAGEMENT O BJECTIVESThe City of Tallahassee’s mission is to provide excellent services and facilities to support a high quality of life for the local community. The City’s Your Own Utilities is a municipal utility owned by the citizens of Tallahassee, providing over 100 years of reliable Electric, Water & Sewer, Gas, and Solid Waste services to the community. As the capital of the State of Florida and home to two major universities, the City of Tallahassee and Your Own Utilities strive to serve as models for other cities, both regionally and nationally, for a high level of service, as well as leadership in technology, community outreach, and environmental stewardship. The City of Tallahassee anticipates the AMI system will serve as a vital tool for achieving its mission and vision. The AMI system is expected to be a service enhancing information technology that will:•Provide the City’s utility customers with messages andtimely utility information in the home or business,including the use of “smart thermostats” and otherdynamic in-home display devices, thereby empoweringthe City’s residents and businesses to control utility usage and costs. A key component of the ability to provideinformation to utility customers is the availability ofrobust and easy-to-use Web applications. •Significantly enhance service to utility customers,including improved billing accuracy, faster customerresponse & more efficient customer service, immediate(on-demand) move-in / move-out meter reads, remotemeter connect/disconnect, improved reliability and outage management.•Improve the Utility’s operational efficiency and reducecosts through reliable interval data from electric, gas and water meter reads for energy purchasing, time-of-usepricing programs, prompt notification of leaks, tampering, & theft, and distribution load analysis.•Help the City achieve its goal of energy efficiency andenvironmental stewardship by providing the infrastructure to support a future demand response and load controlprogram that will reduce utility capacity growth needs,thereby reducing costs and environmental impact. •Provide the flexibility and capability for improvementsand expansion in order to provide for growth and otherfuture services and features to benefit the Tallahasseecommunity.III.M ETER D ATA M ANAGEMENTThe City is implementing an MDMS, including an integrated web application to present energy usage and bill information to customers – when and where they want the information. The integrated system will support current and future applications and business processes as enabled by the AMI.The Smart Gridfor an Integrated Multi-Service UtilityReese GoadCity of Tallahassee978-1-4244-6547-7/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEEThe business benefits from AMI and MDMS are expected to include the following as a minimum:1.Facilitate timely and accurate billing to Citycustomersa.Accurate consumption and interval readsdelivered to City billing applications reliably2.Support Energy Conservation via Demand Response(DR) – dynamic pricing programsa.Time of Use (TOU), Critical Peak Price(CPP)…b.Demand side reduction by smart loadcontrol devices3.Facilitate proactive customer communication, forexample:a.High bill alertsb.Energy bill to date ($) since the last billc.Outages4.Improve outage managementa.Automated outage notificationsb.Restoration verification5.Ready access to Utility information via Webapplicationsa.Utility customer access via easy-to-use Webinterfaceb.Customer Service RepresentativeapplicationsIV.I MPLEMENTATION C HALLENGESThe City has experienced challenges in two fronts: technology availability and maturity, and internal process changes. Both challenges are primarily due to the requirements of implementing an integrated system that support all utility services of the City, including water, sewer, refuse as well as electric and gas. The support of multiple utility services is critical to the City constituents, who are used to consistent and quality service from one agency – one bill, one website, one call, etc.However, the AMI technologies that are best for electric metering may not be best or completely proven, or sometimes might not have worked before, for gas and water for example. The bill-to-date presentment to customers over the web was not available in the off-the-shelf product for example. Furthermore, besides Demand Side Management, the City intends to realize the benefits of AMI and MDM in revenue management and outage management, etc.The City itself has differences in the metering operations for electric and gas, for example, in the move-in move-out disconnect, reconnect as well as meter reading practices. These process differences make the deployment and benefit realization even more challenging.Nevertheless, the City, and its prime contractor/partner, Honeywell, as well as its technology product suppliers, have worked diligently to address these challenges, so that the City is now seeing success and beginning to experience return of its technology investments.V.P ROJECT S TATUSPhase I, the Smart Metering network, is expected to be completed by the end of 2009 with approximately complete with approximately 195,000 of 220,000 meters installed as of November 2009. Upon completion, the city expects to operate the first electric, water and gas smart metering network in the nation.Phase II, the implementation of the MDMS and integrated web application began in April 2009. The information and customer energy management tools will be released early 2010. Additional functionality such as customer rate selection, customer rate analysis tools, smart thermostat management, and bill alert information will be available summer 2010.In October 2009, the City was named as one of the 100 SGIG awardees, 1 of only 5 in the customer system category. The grant will be used to complete Phase III of the project, which will include deployment of approximately 15,000 smart thermostats, and implementation of an auto-demand response program for commercial customers over the next two (2) years.。