Meter data management for the electricity market

The quality of the meter data for billing and analysis is very important in the electricity market. The meter data is used primarily in billing & settlement for industrial customers and bulk trading partners who have direct access to data, and used secondarily in trading, transmission operations & planning, and load forecasting & scheduling who don't have direct access to data. A software system called the metering data management (MDM) system has been developed using the web service technology to support the meter usage data collection, validation, estimation, versioning, and publishing at Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a US Federal Power Marketing Agency. One of its key features is the validation and estimation of the meter usage data based on statistical models. The paper presents the infrastructure and implementation details of MDM. It also addresses a novel approach to validating the meter data and estimating missing values in the meter data. The key performance criteria of MDM are scalability, collaboration, integration, in addition to good data acquisition and data persistence capabilities. Further more, use of the meter data with weather information for more accurate validation and estimation is also discussed.