In
contrast to the domestic and general purpose customers who are on
prepaid metering, large industrial and commercial customers are on the
credit metering system. This is a type of metering whereby customers are
given the latitude to utilize the power on credit and then pay after
receipt of invoice/bill. LEC applies this type of metering to all its
large customers. Large customers contribute a major part of revenue
stream at LEC and hence require special attention and service
arrangements.
The
types of meters used in this category are programmable Enermax, Enermax
plus and Elster from different suppliers by thus doing helping LEC to
compare the performance of different meters and not relying on one
supplier. For the purpose of value added service to our most valued
customers, LEC has adopted the application of programmable meters. The
facilities offered by these meters include but not limited to;
consumption data profiling for future retrieval and analysis, Quality of
Supply to ensure that standards are being complied to.
LEC
provides access to the profile data to all large customers on request.
This data helps customers in analyzing their day-to-day consumption
patterns and the size of generators needed for their load during load
shedding and power failures. The data also provide adequate tool for
customers’ energy management systems. Through this our customers also
enjoy the latitude of verifying their electricity bills from the first
hand data.
Remote
meter reading facility also provides the on-line billing information to
our customers. This facility is being explored within LEC and customers
will be notified as soon as it has been launched. This facility is
aimed at providing service like; automatic meter reading at
pre-determined period, generate various reports, customers access to
meter and billing data, automatic dispatch of reports to customers etc.
In general, the main objective of this system is to offer improved
customer service to our most valuable customers.
Hand
held units are used for down loading of profile and billing data from
the meters. This helps to eliminate the human intervention during meter
readings. At present, data from these units is imported into the
electronic interface, then into the billing software, hence reducing
some human intervention in the billing process, which might lead to
erroneous bills. The objective is to achieve zero billing errors.
As
a mitigating measure, LEC provides large customers (on request), their
average summer and winter consumption(Baselines) in order to contribute
in the process of reducing overall peak demand by 10%, so as to avoid
regional crisis of power shortfalls. This intervention is commonly
known as load management.
In
order to quantify the benefit of any intervention, one needs to compare
the performance of the system after the intervention to what the
performance would have been if nothing was done. The problem is that the
"would have been" scenario does not exist anymore? Therefore, one needs
some model (baseline) to re-construct this performance.
The following graph depicts the desired outcome of the intervention by the customers.
The savings shown on the graph above denote the expected 10% reduction in both the consumption and the peak demand.