Energy reporting helps to cut electricity bills

Vattenfall is launching an energy reporting service in the area covered by its grid, providing consumers with the opportunity to monitor their real-time electricity consumption to an accuracy of one hour. The service, developed in co-operation with Tieto, could bring customers significant cost savings.

Even before the Finnish government passed a law mandating remotely readable electricity meters by 2014, Vattenfall had begun installing the new meters. Now that they are in place, Vattenfall is also able to offer energy reporting services to its customers.

The energy reporting service is a joint development project by Tieto and Vattenfall. The service is facilitated by an extensive measurement database, supplied to Vattenfall by US company E-Meter, and by data transmission services, supplied by TeliaSonera.

“We want to exploit the new measuring technology in order to bring benefits, such as the energy reporting service, to our customers. For some years now, we have provided our customers with services such as real-time information by SMS and online mapping in case of power failures. Furthermore, our customers are no longer billed on the basis of estimated consumption but on the basis of actual consumption measured in the billing period,” says Account Manager Ville Sihvola of Vattenfall Nordic Distribution.

Tieto was a natural choice as partner since we already shared a history of developing self-service functionality together. Both parties also considered it important that new applications were developed.

All data collected in an enormous data bank

Energy reporting will rely on an enormous data bank which has accumulated in the remote meters since the switch to the new metering technology.

“In the years of traditional meters, approximately 2.3 million entries per year were saved in the data bank. With the new meters 9.4 million entries are entered each day,” says Service Manager Tiina Lautala of Vattenfall Verkko.

She gives particular praise to Tieto for having created an application that meets the challenge of these enormous data volumes. The application retrieves the customers’ consumption data within moments from the Vattenfall measurement database and produces the requested reports without delay.

“The basic package includes a presentation of real-time hourly consumption in an Excel file or in graph format. In the future we could add a variety of sub-applications which are of interest to specific consumers. Such sub-applications could include various comparisons, alerts or forecasts,” says Lautala.

Once consumers see their own consumption in a graphic format, they will be better equipped to make adjustments to it. Reducing consumption and achieving more stable levels of consumption can save customers money on their electricity bill. This way the advantages of the service can also be measured on a broader scale: if everyone knew how to steer their consumption in the right direction, savings in power generation would be achieved on a national level.

“I view the situation as a case of evolution, not revolution. On-site reading of electricity meters used to be a part of our business, but that has now been taken over by new technology. Efficient automation has enabled the development of new services and improved cost efficiency. This creates excellent opportunities for us to move our business forward,” Sihvola emphasises.

Heli Siponen from Tieto and Ville Sihvola and Tiina Lautala from Vattenfall are looking forward to seeing consumer reactions to the new energy reporting service.