Engineering services

Tender description

This Request for Information was initiated to enhance the use smart meter data. UK Power Networks published an International Best Practice Report for smart meters in 2018. This report focused on the use of smart meter data to decrease energy losses in electricity networks. Our Best Practice Report indicated that smart meters could aid the following engineering activities to reduce technical and non-technical losses: — power factor management, — voltage optimisation, — improving load imbalance, — optimising distribution transformer sizes, — feeder reconfiguration, — comparing aggregated smart meter consumption data to energy flow measurements from an upstream location to quantify non-technical losses, — deploying “complex algorithms” to detect unbilled energy usage. Our best practice report can be viewed in this location: https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/losses/static/pdfs/smart-meters-and-losses-best-practice-review.bbbb974.pdf Vendors are invited to propose innovative solutions to address the following barriers highlighted in our Benchmarking Report: — incomplete smart meter penetration levels lead to “data gaps”, which complicate engineering calculations and losses management by extension, — the averaging process inherent to data sampling skews energy loss calculations, — metering inaccuracy of +/-2 % limits our ability to detect smaller non-technical losses, — data aggregation will limit the accuracy of energy loss calculations, — customers’ phase connections are often unknown, which hinders the use of smart meter data to estimate energy losses very accurately.