Rodan Energy Solutions wishes to commend the Ontario Energy Board for the proposed amendments to Distribution System Code Section 5.1.3 and express our thanks for the opportunity to comment.
We believe that mandating the use of interval meters for customers with a monthly average peak demand of 50 kW and above will provide significant benefits to these consumers and to utilities. These changes, when implemented, will greatly enhance the consumer’s ability to engage in demand response, energy efficiency and conservation initiatives.
Among the barriers to customer participation in intelligent load management is access to their data in real time or near-real time. Rodan encourages the OEB to give special consideration to the following meter functionality that will further facilitate CDM/DSM participation:
• Metering installations to have a customer-accessible communication port
• Interval resolution of 5 minutes
These meter features are important because customers require “near real time” data to participate in DR programs. In addition, access to such data allows for cost effective energy management and verification of energy efficiency measures. Enabling these tools to date has required the LDC to install communication outputs and new meters, and for the DR provider to install communication hardware to harvest the data from the LDC meter to forward to a server for presentment. This has added significant costs and time delays which can be avoided by including these two minimum requirements to the metering specifications.
To avoid inconsistency across Ontario, we recommend that the OEB include minimum requirements for metering installations that provide for: a) customer access to a meter communication port; and b) meters that provide 5-minute interval data.
Rodan would be pleased to further discuss our recommendations.
Contact us: 905-625-9900 or info@rodanenergy.com
