Rappahannock Electric Cooperative (REC) sought insights into system line losses beyond basic purchase and sale of kilowatt hours. In an effort to understand the losses and gain the ability to accurately identify losses at a granular level, the analytics team embarked on a line loss analytics partnership with Burns & McDonnell.

Using advanced analytics algorithms the team explored the relationships between SCADA, AMI and MDM systems for detection of unmetered loads, losses from system conditions such as impedance, or possible energy theft. The essential question for the team was: What is driving the usage jumps? If AMI readings exceeded average levels of kilowatt-hour usage, it was a clue to dig deeper. If it was a residential meter, could the spike have been caused by electric vehicle charging? If commercial or industrial meters showed unusual power consumption, other possible explanations were explored.

This portion of the project involved reviewing the billing data from wholesale energy purchased at the transmission delivery point in comparison to cleansed retail billing data. This comparison was a key step in analyzing how much energy REC was losing on its system. From a billing perspective, the assumption was that unsold energy is considered a loss to REC.  The outcome of this project provided REC more actionable insights into the different functions of load and losses indicative of their system, resulting in alignment of core systems for a precision approach to reducing losses in the future. Join us during this presentation to continue the discussion from UA Week with a more detail exploration of the analytic journey that produced dashboards for REC, leading to an accurate and in-depth understanding of their system losses and significant reduction in wholesale costs to their members.