Portland Bureau of Water Works Leads Joint Utility AMR Project for Load Research

Through a combination of focused objectives, good management, suitable technology and a bit of luck, the Portland, Oregon, Bureau of Water Works, Portland General Electric (PGE) and PacifiCorp have made joint-utility automatic meter reading (AMR) for demand data a reality.

Managers at Portland Bureau of Water continuously search for ways to improve access to hard-to-read meters -- including meters along some suburban routes, vault meters that require two people to read, and outdoor meter boxes that must be pumped out -- and increase meter-reading productivity. The bureau's meter readers recently converted to a handheld meter-reading system, but the utility's AMR team has investigated alternatives for many years. The team recently conducted a trial of mobile radio AMR.

One member of the team, bureau economist Jim Burke, had an additional need: load-research data. To analyze demand patterns and observe peak demand events, Burke needed to collect frequent meter readings from a widely distributed random sample of customers.

His objective was to reliably capture meter readings on a schedule he could vary on demand. The Bureau of Water, like most energy companies, has summer and winter peaks -- the latter when the temperature drops below freezing and people let their faucets drip to keep pipes from bursting. Burke wanted readings as often as every 15 minutes and no less frequently than daily.

Burke spent more than a year looking for a solution. Bureau staff members decided that data recorders and radio-read solutions were too expensive for this application. They also wanted a proven technology.

The bureau needed a system that could provide a burst download of reading information, as well as the capability to store information in the event of a disruption in communications. Project managers also wanted to avoid potential battery replacement problems related to high-read rates. It appeared that a telephone-based solution would allow them to get readings from a widely distributed sample

With help from one meter vendor, bureau representatives developed a budget and released a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a telephone-based AMR system that could provide short-increment data. They expected responses from large meter companies, but were pleasantly surprised to find Teldata Inc. participating in the proposal process.

Through conversations with the Chicago-based AMR vendor, bureau planners learned that Teldata could address its monitoring needs with their Meter Sentry AC-4 telephone-based meter-interface unit (MIU).

Power Sources Get Metering Opportunity Because Teldata's unit is AC-powered, Burke realized that the sources of that power could be potential beneficiaries of the project.

Burke contacted his counterparts in the Load Research Analysis departments at PGE and PacifiCorp (formerly Pacific Power and Light), and offered them a deal: "If you pay the marginal cost of putting your meter on the system and provide the electric power for the MIU, I'll pay the rest." The arrangement meant that the electric companies only had to retrofit or install an AMR-compatible meter, wire it to the MIU, and provide a 12-volt power supply off the electric line by the meter pan.

Burke wanted the deployment to progress as smoothly as possible. Project arrangements were incorporated in simple memorandums of understanding, with the proviso that the utilities could leave the project any time. Portland Water would maintain the system.

Of the 500 sites involved in Phase I of the project, PGE serves 80 percent of the customers, and PacifiCorp serves the remaining 20 percent.

When Burke explained the project to PGE lead research analyst Linda Ecker, she was intrigued and thought the project would be viable. Because Burke already created a sample of residential customers, PGE's main concern was that this sample included a mix of electric heat and no-heat customers. The sample consists of about 20 percent heat and 80 percent non-heat customers, which closely matches PGE's existing customer base of single-family residential customers.

Meghan Jonee-Guinn, a PGE load-research analyst, says PGE's objectives in participating include:

• Testing new technology for next-day forecasting and reconciliation for PGE's customer choice program.

• Economically expanding its load-research sample, taking advantage of the economies of scale of the system to leverage limited research resources.

• Providing opportunities for private and public utility collaboration. In the new competitive environment, PGE plans to work with different types of customers on a variety of new projects. This project will provide PGE staff with experience working with government entities.

Once Burke found the partners he needed, the telephone company began to support the project as well. Forty percent of the installations did not have the necessary network interface devices (NIDs). The telephone company has devoted a field team to the installation, and is installing NIDs where none exist.

The project has two phases. Phase I involves installing meter-monitoring equipment on a random sample of 500 single-family residential customers. It is designed to study residential water use and correlate demand patterns to time of day, weather and demographic factors, and physical characteristics.

Phase II will expand the system to more than 200 commercial customers, including wholesale purchasers, who account for 70 percent of the bureau's water consumption. The sample is stratified only by geographic district, so that there is a proportional number of participants from each service district in the city.

Installation Process Requires Coordination While the installation is straightforward, the retrofit of connections between the premise's pit meter and the electric and telephone connections, typically at the side of the house, requires the coordination of several steps:

1. The Water Bureau will install a new AMR-compatible meter and use a cable plow to bury a standard telephone cable containing three pairs of wires, a braided sheath coating and gel impregnation from the meter box to the house.
   

2. The electric utility's meter shop will retrofit a GE meter with an RS-1 unit that provides 12-volt power to the MIU.
   

3. The electric utility will install the meter on the customer's house.
   

4. The telephone company will install an NID near the meter.
   

5. Teldata will install the MIU and connect it to the water meter, the electric meter and the NID.
   

6. The Teldata installer will program the MIU and test the connection to the host computer and database.
   

Only two types of water meters had sufficient resolution (one cubic foot) to provide useful information at the short-time intervals between meter readings. The final meter choice was left to the bureau's meter shop, and they selected the Kent ABB meter because of its dial-position encoder.

Participants Pass Rigorous Selection Process Participant recruitment has been more difficult than anticipated because the process is more complicated and tedious than project organizers originally planned. All project participants are volunteers, winnowed from the general population of water customers using an elaborate process.

To solicit customer participation, the bureau sent an initial mailing to prospects drawn at random from the single-family residential customer population. The letter described the city's project and what would be involved by participating (that is, running a small cable from the meter to the outside of the house, installing a small plastic box on the side of the house, and connecting it to the telephone line), and informed them that there would be no cost to them nor interference with their telephone service.

Bureau representatives made follow-up telephone calls to determine whether prospects were interested in participating, then mailed agreements to customers who said yes. About 30 percent of those solicited agreed to participate, Burke reports, but some people demurred because they were suspicious of government agencies or simply did not want to be bothered, and a small group did not want the bureau to disturb their yards.

For the customers who returned the agreement -- approximately 50 percent of those who agreed to participate in the project -- the bureau arranged a pre-installation site inspection. To avoid problems, deployment was not considered if it was evident installation might unduly disturb the resident's landscaping.

About half the sites passed the pre-installation inspection, yielding a participation rate of approximately 7 percent of all customers originally contacted. "If I had to do it again," says Burke, "I would make access to the meter for this purpose a condition of service." Though 15 percent of the customer sites would prevent installation, the bureau would still have been able to access to 85 percent of the customers through a condition-of-service provision.

Burke avoided potential bureaucratic headaches by contracting out the participant-recruitment and installation processes, and keeping the project administration self contained. He believes this approach to recruitment, while requiring more time and intricacies than initially anticipated, has saved time and helped to meet important project goals: accountability and customer satisfaction.

"We placed a lot of emphasis on minimizing the disturbance to customers, both at the time of installation and during project operations," Burke says. Of the 300 meters installed so far, only eight customers involved in the project have logged complaints.

"We needed this project to be as turnkey as possible. We chose to change out the water meters ourselves, but the rest of the work was contracted to Teldata," Burke says. "Both our own meter crews and the installation subcontractors chosen by Teldata have done a good job in getting the work done. They have recognized the importance of -- and have maintained -- good customer relations."

Status and Costs of AMR Project By mid-December 1997, all new meters were installed and wired, and Phase I MIU installation had begun. After MIU installation is completed in March, the units will be programmed to call host computers and download recorded data every night at midnight. Phase II, scheduled to begin July 1, will consist of 200 to 250 commercial installations.

The cost of the project is about $750 per participant. The overall project budget for contracted work is about $250,000, including the equipment and the installation Additional in-kind costs also are associated with the project. Burke believes that if the bureau's AMR team were to do the project again, they could probably manage it for $400-$500 per installation, half of which is hardware.

Water Bureau Identifies Project Benefits The Water Bureau expects to realize a number of benefits from this project. "These data are essential to providing the kinds of demand forecasts that can be used to support our capital facilities planning," Burke says. "Already, our engineers are clamoring for the demand forecast data we have. This project will enable us to apply this information much more specifically to the geographic and demographic characteristics of different neighborhoods within the city."

The bureau anticipates long-term benefits to include savings in capital facilities expenditures resulting from better sizing and improved understanding of long-term service needs. They also expect several spin-off benefits not directly related to the demand analysis:

• Usage pattern information will complement SCADA system information and the bureau's existing hydraulic and systems analysis models.
  

• The long-term regional water supply plan envisions that as much as 15 percent of the 50-year demand must be satisfied through conservation. Demand analysis will provide the information needed to gauge these targets.
  

• Potential market-study benefits may come from the information, including a better understanding of residential end-use patterns.
  

• The bureau's cost-of-service analysis used in annual rate-making will draw upon the project's data.
  

• By better understanding peak demand cycles and habits, short-term residential usage forecasting is expected to improve.

Several Elements Contribute to Success Burke attributes much of the success of the project to the cooperation between the partners: the Water Bureau, PGE and PacifiCorp. "While we have some common interests in our objectives to improve the data used in load research, we have recognized that we're all in this for different reasons," Burke says. "None of us have tried to force our agendas on the others."

Burke was fortunate enough to assemble a group of people whose attitude was, "Let's figure out what we have to do to get this project to work." The group was results-driven, but none of the members had developed a preconceived notion of how to do things.

The Teldata AC-4 unit also made this project easy, managers say. The MIU has port addressability, so the utilities don't have to worry about data security, and no one has to operate the system for anyone else. Because the system uses no proprietary architectures or protocols, the MIU can read virtually every type of water, gas or electric meter available.

"Portland Water Bureau's project dovetailed nicely with our Distribution 2000+ project for outage monitoring and meter reading," says Lauren Pananen, a meter engineer for PacifiCorp. The PacifiCorp project uses inbound telephone devices from Design Concepts Inc. (DCI), a Boise, Idaho, company recently acquired by Spokane, Washington-based Itron Inc. PacifiCorp has nearly 500 points on the DCI system in Portland.

"Having utilities get together is not too unusual…..PacifiCorp and PGE meter shops have always been getting together on common metering issues," Pananen says. For this project, "it was mostly a matter of getting together in a room and deciding how to get the job done."

PacifiCorp planners say they also can integrate the bureau's system into their objects-based distribution-automation integration framework. "Just set another computer system down in this framework and tie it to the existing billing, dispatch and facilities management systems. PacifiCorp's Common Object Request Brokered Architecture [CORBA] integration middle-ware can handle virtually any technology," Pananen says. "It should not be much of a problem to integrate the Water Bureau's system."

Utilities Outline Future Plans Although this technology can be used for billing purposes, neither the bureau nor PGE intend to bill using the Teldata system. Instead, the utilities will focus on acquiring detailed data for load research. However, PacifiCorp will use the Teldata system's readings for billing.

"As soon as the system settles down, we'll stop reading the meters manually," said Pananen. In addition, PacifiCorp is exploring ways to fully implement AMR in the Portland service area.

PGE may participate with the bureau in Phase II, which focuses on commercial non-residential customers, depending on what it learns from the Phase I project.

For load research, PacifiCorp is in the process of replacing a custom ELM system with the MV-90 system to read Alpha, GE TMR-92, EV and other meters. The company also may install Teldata outage alarms

Burke says he is trying to "evangelize" the project to wholesale users who represent the bureau's major accounts. "Our suburban customers use 40 percent of our water and we'd like to know as much about their usage as we can. Plus, they can benefit from the project in the same ways we do. It's a good outcome for everyone."

Also under consideration is a plan to hook simple pressure or temperature transducers on to other MIU ports to expand system functions. Discussions are now under way to include Northwest Natural Gas, the local natural gas utility, in the multi-utility partnership.

Burke believes that while this is a specialized deployment of AMR for the Portland Bureau of Water and its partners, it demonstrates a valuable function that can only realistically be accomplished through AMR technology.

About the Author: Donald Schlenger, Ph.D., is a principal consultant for <%=company%> , which has headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also is a member of the Publications Committee and Board of Trustees of Northbrook, Illinois-based Automatic Meter Reading Association (AMRA).

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the January, 1998 issue of the association's publication AMRA News. For more information on this topic the association can be contacted at: Tel.847-480-9628; Fax. 847-480-9282.

AMRA is an international, nonprofit organization founded in 1986 in response to concerns about standardization, justification and deployment practices involved with the development and application of advanced metering and communications technologies. The association's main goal is to provide a forum for members and other industry leaders to share their knowledge about emerging technologies, strategies and business opportunities. AMRA members include employees of water, electric and gas utilities; communications carriers; equipment manufacturers; regulatory agencies; research organizations; financial investment firms; and consultants.