Modern Components of Electric Utility Billing

Modern Components of Electric Utility Billing–Including Impacts of AI is a 4-hour class that explains the various billing components including how technology, including AI, is enhancing these components. Electric utilities use different billing components to address specific operational and financial aspects of electric utility operations.

Modern Components of Electric Utility Billing class, includes:

• Energy, Legacy pricing measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh) or megawatt-hours (MWh)

• Energy, Now becoming more common measured in kVA-hours (kVAh) or MVA-hours (MVAh)

• Billing multipliers & how incorrect multipliers have cost utilities millions of dollars due to under billing of customers.

• The role of voltage (potential) transformers and current transformers in calculating multipliers.

• Power factor including kVAr charges, reactive charges

• Peak Demand using watts including kW demand MW demand

• Peak Demand using watts with a power factor adjustment (kW demand with power factor adjustment and MW demand with  power factor adjustment)

• Peak demand using volt-amps including kVA demand and MVA demand

• Energy, Time-of-use pricing

• Energy, Real-time pricing

• Energy, Tiered pricing

• Demand response

• Reimbursing customers for energy when customers produce energy that exceeds consumption. 

• Reimbursing customers for energy based on daily demand curves and annual demand curves.

• Role of digital metering in implementing modern components of billing.

Price
$4,320 for first 24 students and $180 for each additional student plus instructor expenses from Portland, Oregon and shipping of books.

If you are a smaller municipal utility or co-op without 24 people for a class, have a utility association to which your utility belongs sponsor the class. If the association cannot, we have two recommendations. One is to contact neighboring utilities and determine their interest in jointly sponsoring a class. The second is to email PTS@utilitytraining.net and request a list of other associations who are conducting a class. PTS will provide links to the associations for any classes that are currently scheduled.

Prerequisites
Students registering for the Modern Components of Electricity Billing class should have a solid understanding of voltage and current, single-phase and 3-phase, and voltage transformers. 

Pre-class Quiz
A 10-minute multiple choice quiz will be administered at the beginning of the class to determine each student’s understanding of the above prerequisites. We use the quiz results to determine the correlation of understanding the prerequisites to how each student evaluates the class.

Who Should Attend?

The Modern Components of Electric Utility Billing class is designed for those serving as the primary contacts between customers and the utility including:

• Customer Service Representatives

• Key Account Executives (also called Energy Advisors) who work with a utility’s largest customers.

Those responsible for setting or approving rates:

• Employees responsible for cost-of-service studies.

• Employees responsible for drafting rate-increase documentation.

• Management and board members/directors responsible for approving rate increases.

• Government employees responsible for analyzing rate-increase submittals. 

Those working on the technical side of billing including:

• Entry level metering engineers and metering technicians responsible for installing, testing and maintaining meters used for billing.

• IT professionals responsible for writing code for accurate customer billing.

• IT professionals responsible for implementing artificial intelligence for real time pricing and load control.

Those working on strategic planning including

• Planning for new peaking generation resources due to real-time pricing changing daily demand curves.

• Planning for new transmission lines, or transmission upgrades, due to real-time pricing changing daily demand curves.

• Planning for implementing artificial intelligence (AI) for load control and real time pricing.

• Planning for communication systems upgrades due to AI for load control and real time pricing.

• Planning for reimbursing large numbers of customers with in-house generation that exceeds consumption using daily demand curves and annual demand curves.