Case Study
 Half
hourly data saves £1m for South West Water
During 1997, South West Water (SWW) developed a strategic
plan to establish a new energy management and purchasing infrastructure
that would support radically improved contract negotiation
and full control over the company’s electricity spend.
The company currently has an £8m electricity spend across
a diverse portfolio of over 1600 based sites, which are classified
into three groups, based on maximum demand (MD). National
Power is the supplier to 120 SWW sites with +100kW MD, and
an annual spend of £5.5m; SWEB supplies the two remaining
categories - 260 sites using a 30-100kW MD (£1.7m) and
1250 sites with an MD of less than 30kW (£1m).
Key Objectives
South West Water’s Energy Manager, Alan Burgess, commented,
“When we started this project, our existing system was
not Year 2000 compliant, could not handle multiple suppliers
and had no capability for handling half hourly data. The system
was wholly unsuitable for the increasingly data-intensive
and changeable energy supply industry.”
Key objectives were established for the new system, so that
SWW could exploit new opportunities in the competitive market,
including:
- Provision of information to support purchasing decisions
and rate negotiations
- Retrieval of half hourly data direct from the meters
- Provision of information for energy efficiency initiatives,
such as load management and waste reduction.
- Bill verification to ensure supplier invoices are correct
- Improved financial planning and budgeting
- Support for electronic billing through Electronic Data
Interchange (EDI)
- Flexibility, so changes are handled within the software,
without delays or expensive reprogramming
Two Systems Integrated
With these objectives in mind, SWW selected an energy information
system from Stark Software International, comprising two off-the-shelf
products integrated into a single system - Stark EA, an energy
accounting system using data from supplier invoices and meter
readings, and Stark RT, an energy information system for the
automatic collection, storage and manipulation of interval
data direct from meters and data recorders.
Initially, only +100kW sites were half hourly metered, but
the benefits were considered so overwhelming for effective
energy purchase and management, that Code 5 meters were installed
in all sites where the resulting savings would mean break-even
on the costs of metering. Savings of 20% were anticipated
for entering the contract market.
As a result, SWW installed half hourly metering in all sites
with an MD of around 30kW and above, which related to around
90% of their total electricity spend.
Discrepancies
The Stark system provides a check on the billing data by
comparing the raw data from the meters with the billing data
on the monthly disk. Any discrepancies can then be investigated,
to see if an overcharge has to be recovered. The system than
recalculates the bill, using the raw data and the rates stored
in the database for comparison with the supplier’s bill.
For all SWW’s +100kW sites, National Power bills the
company electronically by EDI. This has delivered highly significant
cost savings, including the elimination of manual data entry
and improved data quality from the reduction in keying errors.
Multi-site users
In common with many multi-site energy users, SWW was convinced
of the benefits of electronic billing, but had initial reservations
about losing visibility of the bills, specially bill queries.
The Audit Trail, an application of the Stark EA system, solved
this by applying status flags to each invoice, to manage the
payments process through data validating, bill verification
and exporting an approved payment file to the corporate accounting
system. This has eliminated the danger of paying the same
invoice twice.
This strategy of building an infrastructure for energy management
based on the cornerstone of half hourly data has already resulted
in savings of over £1m on new electricity contracts
now in place.
For further information please call Stark on 01293 776 747
or email: office@stark.co.uk
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