To become the recognized leader in energy services for residential customers was Vattenfall's goal when it launched its “Number One for the Customer” project in 2002. The Swedish utility's challenge was to improve customer services by installing new, innovative metering technology designed to automate meter reading, allow real-time or unscheduled readings, reduce billing errors and minimize meter-reading costs.

Vattenfall is the Swedish word for waterfall. The Royal Waterfall Board was one of the predecessor companies to today's Vattenfall (Stockholm, Sweden), so the name preserves the company's heritage. Vattenfall is now one of Europe's largest energy groups, with operations in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany and Poland. It is headed by the parent company Vattenfall AB, wholly owned by the Swedish State, which has interests in all parts of the electricity chain: generation, transmission, distribution and energy trading.

PROJECT SCOPE

The heart of the “Number One for the Customer” project is an electricity automatic meter-reading (AMR) system that includes the development and installation of 850,000 residential meters in the homes of Vattenfall customers living in the central, northern and western regions of Sweden. The project allows for the potential increase to install a total of 1 million meters. During project implementation, the scope extended to include an integral service for the management and operation of the metering system. This ensures that Vattenfall complies with Swedish legal regulations regarding the billing process and improvements in the quality of customer service.

THE SOLUTION

The Vattenfall AMR project formed a sourcing strategy to purchase technology on the market and to impose development in the market by implementing increased or new demands. This strategy has resulted in three contracts with different types of technology and different supply and service concepts. The market development during the project has resulted in increased system functionality and extended service supply. The first two contracts, signed with Actaris (Luxemburg) in 2003 and Iskraemeco (Slovenia) in 2004, were turnkey and included the supply and installation of meters and infrastructure as well as the collecting system. Vattenfall operates both these systems. Vattenfall awarded the third contract to Telvent (Madrid, Spain), an established global company with extensive experience. The five-year contract with a value of approximately 67 million euros (US$100 million) includes management of metering information, reporting, maintenance and support of all devices included in the contract.

The AMR infrastructure is a single channel for data exchange with a number of important issues like operation and maintenance and exploitation costs. However, the metering interfaces offer the possibility of using new and different applications that are useful and add value to the utility distribution business.

Vattenfall selected a solution based on the Telvent Metering System (TMS), a tightly coupled set of components that work together to provide the core infrastructure for delivering networked energy services to a utility. It consists of a set of intelligent, communicating digital electricity meters, powerful IP-connected data concentrators and system software based on the Echelon's (Madrid) Panoramix enterprise software platform and Telvent's Titanium.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

TMS meters are designed to meet the needs of residential and small commercial energy consumers. All TMS meters provide the same functionality, including load profiling, time-of-day pricing, power-quality measurements, display of energy consumption, remote disconnection of the electricity supply, prepaid metering and maximum power limiting. Each meter has a programmable threshold allowing the utility to limit the customer's service to less than the meter rating and associated wiring. The meter has an integrated disconnection switch if the customer's load exceeds the threshold value for a specific time period.

A feature of the meter is that it can be configured and read on the communication link via the power line using ANSI/EIA-709, the open standard implemented by Echelon's power-line-carrier technology over the CENELEC A-Band. Every meter has the capability, managed by data concentrators, to act as a repeater to reach meters remote from the data concentrator. Thus, data concentrators are free to select repeaters as required to ensure reliable end-to-end communications.

The meters operate as a stand-alone watt-hour meter until programmed by Echelon at the time of manufacture using configuration information provided by the utility or by installation contractors using Echelon's Network Energy Services (NES) provisioning software over the network.

During operation, the data concentrators maintain accurate time based on the time reference from the NES system software, which collects the data from the utility network time protocol (NTP) server. Configuration changes can be made to the installed meter remotely using the NES system software.

TMS data concentrators provide the connectivity infrastructure between meters and the TMS data-collection system as they are connected to distribution transformer secondary winding, ensuring they communicate and supervise the meters connected to the transformer low-voltage winding. Data concentrators have access to all three phases, the compact packaged assembly being suitable for installation at or near transformers installed in ground-mounted, underground and pole-mounted substations.

DATA FLOWS

The service center can receive alarms through the Titanium application from the communication operator or network, the collector in the network, the network server in the network or a customer phone request (Fig. 1). The service center registers the alarm in the data center and the remote handling to solve the problem commences. If the remote handling is successful, the issue case is closed. In the event the service center is unable to remotely solve the alarm situation, the following sequence of events is promoted:

• A request is manually entered in the work-order management system by the service center for a work order from the customer.

• A work order is generated by the customer and automatically sent to the work-order management system.

• The work order is routed to a technician who receives a copy on a PDA or PC.

• Following completion of the job, the work order is updated with the correct information.

• The completed order is sent to the customer with information about the issue.

• If new data is required from the meter, the customer automatically provides the actual meter reading in Titanium.

The data flow for work-order management (Fig. 2) is as follows:

• Work orders generated by the customer are automatically sent to the work-order management system.

• Technicians receive the work order on their PDA or PC.

• On work completion, the technician updates the completed work order.

• The customer is sent a copy of the completed work order.

• The customer updates the system with changes communicated to Titanium.

• If new meter data is required, the customer automatically updates the actual meter reading in Titanium.

By March 2005 some 145,000 customers were connected to an AMR system. To date, the objectives sought by Vattenfall and the customers with respect to cost savings and improved service quality have been satisfied.

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Erik Nordgren has an MSME degree. He joined Vattenfall in 2000 as the purchase controller of Business Unit Distribution, progressing to be responsible for Group Purchasing Coordination in Vattenfall Group. In 2005, he was appointed Head of Vattenfall Eldistribution AB's AMR project. Nordgren has 20 years of experience in project and purchasing management in the steel, mining and pulp-paper industries in Sweden, as well as the Middle East and Eastern Europe. erik.nordgren@vattenfall.com

Christer Johansson earned a MSEE degree prior to joining Vattenfall in 1992. Since 2002, he has worked as project manager on the AMR project, in which he was responsible for the rollout of the AMR system in Vattenfall Eldistribution. Johansson has been involved in all three procurements that Vattenfall has made to date. christerjohansson@vattenfall.com

METERING SOFTWARE INTEGRATION

Software architecture in the Telvent Metering System (TMS) is based on a tier model using standard and scalable technologies. The TMS system shows a Web interface used for the administration of the whole AMR system; this allows many users to work simultaneously for administration and maintenance issues, speeding configuration of devices and system management. This Web interface is part of the Titanium v2.0 platform.

This presentation tier uses some of the services implemented for Titanium v2.0 Web services technology for assessing the AMR data acquisition tier; and for the communication devices (meters and data concentrators), Panoramix v2.0 implements the acquisitions tier. Finally, both the presentation and AMR acquisition tiers use storage in databases as the third tier of the complete system. (SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition is the product used for this task.)

This n-tiers architecture allows high scalability of the complete system by allowing new servers to be independent of and isolated from the existing tiers. In the architecture, two servers in a cluster configuration ensure availability and hardware fault tolerance. The cluster technology used is a Microsoft Cluster Server.

Information stored in the system database.

AMR daily tariffs	Logging information
AMR data acquisition (billing and LP data)	Meter configuration
AMR data exporting	Meter configuration information
AMR hourly data	Ordered meter reading
Applications	Planned meter reading
Event and alarm management	Spontaneous meter reading
Events historical data	Tariff details
Installed devices information	User and group management