Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) is the remote collection of consumption data from customer’s utility meters over telecommunications, radio, power line and other links. AMR provides water, electric and gas utility service companies the opportunity to streamline metering, billing and collection activities, increase operational efficiency and improve customer service. The AMR system consists of thre...

Evidence suggests that rational alternatives do not necessarily drive the choices made by real individuals in the privacy of their homes, Therefore, an understanding of the characteristics of the utility’s customer base, is useful to help design utility programs that target the customer’s ordinary daily practices. This paper summarizes the main results of a method to highlight familial habits b...

With the cost of consuming resources increasing (both economically and ecologically), homeowners need to find ways to curb consumption. The Almanac of Minutely Power dataset Version 2 (AMPds2) has been released to help computational sustainability researchers, power and energy engineers, building scientists and technologists, utility companies, and eco-feedback researchers test their models, sy...

An electricity demand reduction project based on comprehensive residential consumer engagement was established within an Australian community in 2008. By 2011, both the peak demand and grid supplied electricity consumption had decreased to below pre-intervention levels. This case study research explored the relationship developed between the utility, community and individual consumer from the r...

With the recent advances in smart grid technologies as well as the increasing dissemination of smart meters, the electricity usage of every moment can be detected in modern smart building environments. Thus, the utility company adopts different price of electricity at each time slot considering the peak time. This paper presents a new electricity usage scheduling algorithm for smart buildings t...

China has been highly successful in electrifying rural areas in the past half century. Institutional structure and its reform are important for investment and, therefore, development of rural electrification. Over time, there have been three major institutional changes initiated by the central government;When the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, it was short of capital, technology and man...

The concept of buying an organization's computing needs on a pay-as-you-go basis is known as Utility Computing. In this model, organizations pay for the usage of applications, either to Information Technology (IT) departments or to an external technology vendor. This approach is similar to the way consumers pay for utility services like electricity, gas, and water. Though the Utility Computing ...

Electricity grids are evolving to “smart grids”. Smart grids employ communication of supply and demand between participants of the grid to achieve better efficiency, availability, resilience, etc. than traditional grids. Consumer households are connected to the smart grid using smart metering and demand response. Smart metering communicates the household’s electricity consumption at high resolu...