Introduction
Jersey Electricity are a vertically integrated power utility dealing in the importation, generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity. We're listed on the London Stock Exchange and serve around 50,000 domestic and commercial customers
Challenge
Jersey Electricity have 660 substations collecting meter data, 330 on our Private LAN network and the remaining we required GPRS data due to geographical locations of the stations, we needed a reliable data transfer to retrieve readings and load profile data to commence at 04:30 each morning, with 99% of data available by 08:00. Which we need to provide to our customers and use for our billing.
Why Airtel-Vodafone?
Airtel-Vodafone proposed a cost-efficient public / private connection over a 3G WAN network for Jersey Electricity’s substations, this solution securely sends the data from the loggers direct to the Jersey Electricity Servers, removing the need for any manual reading, saving costs and time.
Statement from Jersey Electricity
Due to Jersey’s geography and the design and architecture of many of its buildings, JE concluded that a Power Line Carrier (PLC) over its power lines already feeding the customer property would give better coverage than GSM to carry data from individual meters to the Local Data Concentrators (LDCs) installed in almost 800 substations. This would lead to enhanced security, data transfer completeness and resilience. Jersey Electricity then developed its own private Wide Area Network (WAN) across the Island through which to transfer data from half the LDCs to Meterlink’s Meter Data Management (MDM) system hosted on the Jersey Electricity metering server at its Powerhouse HQ. The other 50% of LDCs are served by a public/private 3G WAN designed and developed in partnership with mobile specialists, Airtel-Vodafone, a first for Jersey and both companies.
The connectivity to the 330 modems remains robust, with very little downtime of devices,
The support offered by Airtel Vodafone is good when required. We rarely require support, due to the consistent uptime of devices on the GPRS network.
Richard Marriott,
Senior metering engineer
