초록 ▼

A smart meter/billing system that eases the transition to commodity-like marketplace operations for electric power, and supports near real-time load balancing between competing suppliers of electric power. Existing watt-hour meters become multi-parameter terminals or smart meters that measure consum

A smart meter/billing system that eases the transition to commodity-like marketplace operations for electric power, and supports near real-time load balancing between competing suppliers of electric power. Existing watt-hour meters become multi-parameter terminals or smart meters that measure consumption per unit of time correlatible to calendar-time, measure near real-time demand, measure reliability, store information and transmitting it to a smart meter reader when properly interrogated. The smart reader periodically sends its accumulated information to a billing computer. An optional ancillary system uses the same smart meters to support automatic load balancing between competing suppliers that share common distribution facilities. Supplier designated demand increments from possibly millions of consumers, are summed according to the supplier-of-record, over near real-time intervals. These sums are used by the suppliers to adjust their output power so it equals the actual, near real-time demand of their customers-of-record at any time.

대표청구항 ▼

[ I claim:] [1.] A metering/billing system that when introduced into an existing electric power company facilitates its transition away from present electric utility's cost based, fixed rate, regulated economic model into advanced market based, competitive deregulated economic models, is comprised o

[ I claim:] [1.] A metering/billing system that when introduced into an existing electric power company facilitates its transition away from present electric utility's cost based, fixed rate, regulated economic model into advanced market based, competitive deregulated economic models, is comprised of:a multiplicity of smart meters each being comprised of:means to measure energy consumption per long unit of time; means to sequentially store numbers representing said measured energy consumption, with said numbers being accumulated over a meter read cycle; means to measure time duration of any power outage condition and cumulatively store outage duration times over said meter read cycle; means to permanently store customer ID(identification) code and semi-permanently store current choice-of-supplier code; and a means to respond to properly addressed meter-reader radio commands by reading out said smart meter's stored information for transmission to a meter reader;a number of smart-meter-readers each comprised of: means to initiate an interrogation of a particular smart meter; means to store information being received; means for generating a calendar-time tag for when each smart meter begins interrogation; and means to transfer said meter reader's information, gathered from many smart meter interrogations, to a billing computer; and saidbilling computer is programmed: to receive and appropriately segregate inputted meter reader relayed information; to assign a calendar-time number to each said long unit-of-time over a billing cycle, referencing each said calendar-time number from said meter reader's calendar-time tag; to use choice-of-supplier code to pick the appropriate supplier-provided look-up calendar-time/price listing and using said assigned calendar-time to select price from said listing; to compute each bill from said selected price, and energy consumed over each long unit-of-time interval; and to use cumulative power outage time data to generate an annualized reliability factor for each customer, from which said bill is appropriately adjusted.