One must look to the Netherlands to see how a metering operation functions in a liberalised and regulated market environment. Since the energy law has been implemented in compliance with the EU directive the market partners have been fully occupied in adapting their corporate and operational organisations.

The grid and sales are distinctly separate elements and metering and measuring technology is also a competitive feature. The liberalisation permits the customer to designate a grid operator or to perform the tasks himself; to fit the meters, to read them and to log the data. He assumes responsibility for the collection of the consumption data and ensures that they are logged by the grid operator and billed in compliance with the regulations.

The Netherlands - Democratic Metering

The liberalisation in metrology applies to all customer segments today in The Netherlands; special customers as well as residential customers. However the government are currently debating whether to revoke this freedom of choice for residential customers. In comparison to a regulated approach, the expenditure and risks incurred by a liberalised model are considerable for both the customer and the supplier and do not automatically lead to lower prices.

Consequently reputable service providers undertake the entire process chain from contracting, to metering along with data management and the related security which is prescribed by law. Another factor contributing to the competence bundling under the service providers is the certification by the regulator DTE. Therefore the organisation of a qualified and competitive metering services is only feasible in a larger capacity.

There are currently around 30 metering service providers in The Netherlands. Included among these are 15 - 20 new freelance "metering operators" who originally came from the IT branch or meter manufacturing. In the framework of segmenting the major grid operators, larger companies have been appointed for outsourcing - as with Essent Meetbedrijf. It is the biggest and most prominent Dutch metering operation and reigns supreme as far as data quality and reliability are concerned.

Essent Meetbedrijf and "Project 2003"

GÖRLITZ AG and Essent Meetbedrijf in a joint operation in 2003, successfully realised a major project for automatic meter reading in The Netherlands by implementing the system based on the ENZ2000 and EDW. A 10-month long installation and migration phase which entailed adopting the entire configuration of a prior system with 6,000 meters preceded the live operation of the TMS System which commenced on February 11 2003.

The project was especially noteworthy given the extent of the data volume; the daily retrieval of 15 million metered values for all types of energy from 51,000 metering points at different intervals called for speed and reliability. Moreover it called for a flexible system to enable the continuous expansion during the changeover and in the future.
As a result of the dynamic development of the market in the energy sector and the expansion of Essent Meetbedrijf, the system had to be adaptable in the long-term to the changing requirements for functionality and scaling. The selected system components from GÖRLITZ AG have demonstrated that this is possible. This case study gives an updated description of the project.

Fast scalable system

The architecture has been specified as client-server for the new TMS system and is based on three essential system components:
An ENZ2000 client server control station is used for the parallel collection and remote reading of the data from the meters. 128 data modems are coordinated to read simultaneously which corresponds to about 90 calls per modem for 10,000 meters. This was the initial magnitude specified for the system in 2003. Approximately 50% of the meters still have analogue telephone connections, the remainder are wireless based and connected over GSM.

The data have been directly stored in the EDW database since 2003. The present Oracle database is the leading archive system for meter data, the installed EDW applies different automatic validations levels to audit the values for completeness and plausibilty.

Essent developed a system in 2003 for the further distribution of qualified and aggregated data to the subsequent participants in the market. However this system component is now to be replaced by a combination of EDW3000 and SAP.

Flexible application for every type of energy

Because Essent Meetbedrijf provides services for all energy types, the new system must be exceedingly flexible. In the year 2003, 92% of the metering points originated from the electricity field, 5% from the gas supply and 3% from heat. Shortly after the changeover, the proportion of gas customers increased significantly and 2,000 metering points were added. This led to new sections being mapped in evaluation routines of the EDW3000 which enabled the different billing periods for gas and electricity to be processed simultaneously. For instance a gas day is calculated from 06:00 hours one day to 06:00 hours the following day and contains 24 values whereby the parallel evaluations of the register IDs for electricity entails 96 or 288 values each day as many electricity meters record their data at 5 minute intervals.

Enormous data volume

The data volume was already immense back in 2003. The data volume was already immense back in 2003, the EDW3000 database increased to 130 gigabytes in the first three months. There were 15 million meter values to be processed every day! Growth and reserve capacity were already an issue. Today 20,000 meters are read, with the virtual and aggregated or calculated channels the system EDW3000 processes approximately 150,000 data points - the tendency steadily rising.
The top-class craftmanship of the server system also guarantees a smooth data flow. Each system component disposes of three redundancies. Firstly a development environment is provided for software trials. A second system validates test and acceptance environments for new software versions in relation to the functionality and range of the destination system. The software, having successfully passed all tests, is transferred to the operative system which in turn is a separate system. Moreover by using a cluster technology each system is duplicated therefore guaranteeing additional redundancy at the server level.

The high redundancy rate and the consequent extremely high availability of the entire system are factors valued by Essent Meetbedrijf. A system breakdown can be subsequently made up for and balanced in the space of a day. In the event of a breakdown lasting two days or more, a normal system architecture would never be able to make up for the loss of data and time in addition to coping with the daily operations conducted by the user personnel. For this reason the metering service provider selects a solution with integrated time reserves. The entire system has a daily processing time of almost 10 hours, this includes remote data reading, relocation, validation and output.

Moreover GÖRLITZ AG offers a maintenance and service contract with a support hotline available 24 hours every day of the year and which guarantees prompt assistance in less than 1 day. The system has been in constant operation for a longer period. Essent elected for this method to be applied as it brings a form of insurance for so-called "critical mission" systems and, because no critical errors have surfaced, we are happy to report that it has not yet been resorted to.

Dutch Metering Code

The Dutch Metering Code in an amendment in 2004, imposed regulations on the metering service providers regarding plausibility and substitution of time series data. It dictated complex strategies for data substition which, in the event of a malfunction, could reproduce the consumption profile with the greatest of accuracy. For example the single load profile values of a day are added up and compared with the register "Total Energy Consumption" of the meter. If the values deviate, different concepts must be applied for the data substitution depending on the size of the gap and the type of energy.

Processing register data - a new directive

At the beginning of 2005 with an element of surprise, the regulator DTE prescribed new guidelines for the communication and processing of energy consumption data for special contract customers in The Netherlands. In a relatively short preliminary time, the systems had to be converted to the communication from "meter stands" - register values based on the register data or the consumption from load profiles. The EDW3000 demonstrated its scalability and flexibility, the system was extended and in the meantime, it edits the data from an additional 500,000 registers as stipulated by the DTE.

The new law also demands higher transparency for the participants, e.g. in the case of missing or incorrect values. The results ensuing from load profile checks against register data are now relayed in "E65 messages" to the grid operators. The proposed substitution values should be audited by the customers and grid operators in a specified time limit.

Transparency and Quality

When the system was installed in 2003, the rates of errors in the processed metering values was around 1%. It was a significant problem but could be resolved with the appropriate IT. The system was altered and the data substitution was relocated to the start of the process chain which meant direct relay to the system EDW3000 instead of the previos post-processing EDM or billing systems. Today the system accomplishes a quality rate of 99.5% to 99.8% plausible data for transfer to downstream systems.

The current data quality is presented in continuous overviews to be viewed by the personnel. The quality chart is permanently refreshed and is displayed in the reception area of the company and is an element of the quality security system of Essent Meetbedrijf. Mr. Berry Bijsterbosch, manager of the department Data Management, is justly proud of the quality that is achieved every day. "A metering data operation is a job to be done 365 days in the year. When colleagues start in the morning and see that we have reached 99.8 % during the night, they know immediately they have still 0.2% data as work for the coming day".

The system installed at Essent is one of the most efficient of its kind today in Europe. The successful conclusion of this project serves to confirm the leading position of GÖRLITZ AG in Europe and to underline its expertise.