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 245
i. As an approximation, manual meter reading costs are reduced by the
percentage of the meter fleet that has been converted to AMI.
ii. In reality, the reductions would most likely be “stepped” over time as
meter reading routes become predominantly AMI.
iii. Conversely, manual meter reading unit costs would, in reality, likely rise
over time from existing unit costs to those more appropriately required to
service geographically distant meters.
d. Disconnect / Reconnect
i. Reduced as a percentage of the meter fleet that has been converted to
AMI.
e. Contact Centre
i. Contact centre costs in “new AMI” have been equated to “Status Quo”,
negating any benefit claim.
ii. While there will be contact centre benefits associated with the reduction in
soft reads as AMI goes in, there will also likely be an increase in call
volume related to the extended (20yr+) meter replacement program –
however this would be difficult to quantify. To ease the modeling of this
scenario, the relative costs and benefits have been considered to cancel
each other out.
f. Results:
i. NPV of net customer benefit becomes a cost of $10.830 million.
105.3.1 Please integrate this new scenario into the financial model and
provide in a working spreadsheet and detail assumptions used.
The requested spreadsheet is provided as electronic Excel attachment BCUC IR1 105.3.