FortisBC Inc. (FortisBC) Application for a Certificate of Public ...

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Response:
FortisBC Inc. (FortisBC or the Company)
Application for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity
for the Advanced Metering Infrastructure Project
Response to British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC or the Commission)
Information Request (IR) No. 1
Submission Date:
October 5, 2012
Page 186
82.5 Please estimate the average infrastructure cost per residential household of (i)
the AMI proposal and (ii) an alternative where the advanced meters are only
installed on the feeder level (rather than at customer homes or businesses).
The AMI capital cost per customer is approximately $425. The installation of feeder meters only
would not be effective in detecting energy theft (please see the response to BCUC IR1 Q82.4),
but if deployed would cost approximately $10 in capital per customer. Please also see
response to BCUC IR1 Q84.1.1.
Response:
82.6 Please describe the differences in IT costs if HH load data at individual customer
sites is used as the investigative starting point to identify electricity theft, rather
than the load data from feeder meters.
FortisBC assumes that HH load data refers to interval load data, which in the case of the
proposed AMI system is expected to be hourly.
Hourly interval data consumption data without synchronized load data from feeder meters does
not allow energy balancing. Energy balancing is performed by comparing hourly consumption
measured on a feeder meter to the synchronized hourly total of all customer meters
downstream. This is a simple and highly effective method of detecting theft and other nontechnical
losses.
FortisBC does not contemplate additional IT costs specific to theft detection. The project budget
provides for the addition of one data analyst to extract leads from AMI data on potential theft
sites using existing software tools.
Response:
82.6.1 Is ‘off-the-shelf’ IT software available to identify electricity theft using (i)
HH load data at individual customer sites and (ii) load data from feeder
meters?
FortisBC is aware of “off-the-shelf” software that purports to identify electricity theft.
Commercially available software is primarily based on heuristic algorithms that attempt to detect
theft using load data rather than energy balancing. Software-based heuristic algorithms attempt