AEC Webmeter

History
In the late part of 2001 and the first quarter of 2002, AEC saw a gap in the market for power measuring and monitoring in industrial and commercial facilities. Existing products required the addition of new sensors and that the factory electrical system be deenergized for installation. These units offered extensive capability at a high cost. Most industrial or commercial users want the ability to measure electrical use for cost accounting or productivity monitoring. The advanced features offered were quite often not required and not used. AEC saw the opportunity to offer a low cost, easy-to-use device that would provide an immediate commercial benefit to the user. 

Reasons for Use
Electrical utilities are transitioning into deregulated markets. Customers need to understand how to manage energy use; they need an energy management system for this new environment. The high cost of energy, along with good operating practice, requires that factories monitor energy consumption and make plans to maximize efficiency of energy. An energy management system, consisting of meters, communications, and software, can help to meet these challenges.

Benefits
A key element of the electric company's billing system is the billing meter installed at the user's main service entrance. The utility provider uses this meter to bill for basic electrical usage.

As a key part of an adaptable energy management system, AEC Webmeter offers many benefits, including the ability to monitor the utility providers billing scheme, or even select aggressive new billing schemes without costly replacement of legacy metering equipment. This opens the door to performance contracts based on power quality, demand response and load curtailment programs, real-time pricing, and performance-based tariffs — opportunities which can benefit the utility and the customer alike. AEC Webmeter can provide many ways for power suppliers and consumers to satisfy billing requirements, minimize hardware investments, reduce operating costs, and extend life of existing equipment. An aggressive approach to metering makes a huge difference by tracking usage, controlling consumption. In many cases, AEC Webmeter can satisfy needs for revenue metering. In industrial or commercial facilities with little or no metering in place, a single device that meets the needs of multiple departments can deliver considerable savings from an initial hardware cost standpoint and increase efficiency. 

AEC Webmeter makes vital power system information available to authorized users anywhere around the globe. It displays information through a standard web browser, such as Microsoft® Internet Explorer, and requires no additional software or special configuration. It also allows the copy and paste of data logs from the meter to other enterprise applications, such as Microsoft® Excel, for custom reporting and analysis. 

AEC Webmeter is designed to help energy suppliers, service providers, and consumers take charge of the quality, reliability and cost of their electricity. The meter offers a unique combination of energy information, control capabilities, and low cost to simultaneously address billing, load aggregation, cost allocation, power quality management and distributed generation. It leverages popular communications infrastructures - Internet, Ethernet, telephone, and wireless - to provide a high degree of accessibility, responsiveness and affordability. This same meter can also monitor and report water, steam, air, and any other energy or utility supply that is metered by a pulse type meter, making our meter an extremely versatile device.

How it Works
Traditionally, Operator Interface on the factory floor and commercial operations have previously been implemented in custom and, oftentimes, proprietary software development environments, which keeps the cost of collecting information from the process high.

Embedded Web Servers are beginning to appear on the factory floor. Embedded Web Servers permit information to be distributed to users via easy to use Web Browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer. Web Browsers are easy to set up and use. Most computer users are familiar with these products and require no training.

Most older utility metering devices provide an external signal. This signal is a simple switch (KYZ pulse) that closes and opens at a rate in proportion to the rate of energy usage. The utility provider counts these pulses in order to calculate the amount to bill to the customer. AEC Webmeter counts these pulses at this output. The number of pulses is scaled to convert to kilowatt hours (KWH). KWH is then logged to a data file and presented to the user via web browser.

In addition to billing for electrical usage, utility providers also charge a separate amount based on demand. Demand is a measure of the total electricity used in a given time period (typically 15 or 30 minutes). Since the utility provider must have sufficient installed capacity to provide for the peak amount of electricity that a customer will ever use, they charge a premium anytime a new peak demand is exceeded. This is to encourage the customer to monitor electrical usage and not cause unnecessary peak loads on the electrical distribution system. Peak demand charges are sometimes 50% of the total electrical bill. Peak demand charges may be invoked for several months after a single peak demand event. 

Since the penalty for setting a new peak demand is high, it is advantageous for a user of electricity to monitor and control it. If current demand is known and peak demand at the end of the demand window is estimated based on current usage, then the electrical user can make decisions on whether to continue operations or to stop electrically operated equipment to reduce the demand. Decisions to stop equipment for a few minutes at a critical moment can result in savings of thousands of dollars per month for several months. 

In order to monitor demand in the same time window as the electrical utility provider, it is necessary to synchronize with the demand calculation as the provider's meter. The electric company's metering device provides another KYZ pulse that signals the beginning of a demand window. Electrical usage varies dramatically during the course of a day. Electrical providers charge a premium for electricity used during high demand time periods. These periods vary during time of day, day of week, and time of year. Any meaningful calculation of electrical usage and peak demand must take into account the particular billing scheme in effect from the utility provider. Using accurate billing information, an electrical customer can calculate current charges for electricity. This can be reconciled with the periodic statement from the utility provider.

This combination of embedded Web Server and measurement device provides a low cost and easy to use tool for factory and commercial facility managers to collect information and make decisions to reduce the cost of electricity or other metered utilities.