Monday, December 15, 2014

Calendar Month and Billing Month

Calendar month is the period of duration from the same date of one month to the same date of the next month, which can be 28, 29 (February during a leap year), 30 or 31. Most countries in the world are using solar calendar.

Prior to the smart grid era, the utilities were sending meter readers to read meters every month. Apparently they were not able to read all the meters at the same time. Since the meter readers work during work days, utilities put the customers into twenty plus groups, one for each workday, called a billing group. On each day, they read the meters from the corresponding billing group. Billing month is just the period between the two adjacent billing days for a billing group. The electricity consumption on a monthly bill was the difference between the two monthly meter readings, which can be quite different from the consumption over a calendar month.

For load forecasting purposes, we would like to map the energy on monthly bills to the energy on calendar months. This often involves a convoluted process, which creates a lot of troubles and conflicts between the accounting and planning departments in a utility. A famous and challenging problem, unbilled energy, was born due to the mismatch between calendar month and billing month. One of the benefits of smart meter deployment is to resolve the unbilled energy problem.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note that you may link to your LinkedIn profile if you choose Name/URL option.