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Tacoma Power celebrates six years of AMR and Data Management with Stark RT

Founded in 1843, Tacoma Power is the public owned utility serving the City of Tacoma, Washington. It also serves parts of Pierce County in addition to Tacoma’s downtown financial centre and the large industrial facilities on the Tacoma Tideflats. The Tideflats are home to the Port of Tacoma, the “Gateway To The Pacific Rim”, and a variety of major industries. Tacoma Power also serves the Fredrickson area of Pierce County, a fast growing industrial complex. It now has some of the lowest commercial industrial electricity rates in the US.

Evaluated AMR

In 1995 Tacoma Power evaluated AMR and data management software, including the industry standard MV-90 and chose to purchase the Stark RT program. “We felt RT offered greater flexibility and power in its report writing ability”, commented Joe Gillespie, Tacoma’s Senior Projects Technician (Transmission & Distribution - Meter & Relay). “We were also impressed with RT’s ability to automate many of the labour intensive aspects of gathering, storing and validating the large amount of interval data that we need to bring back to the company network.”

All Substations On Line

Now, in 2001 Tacoma Power is bringing in 450 channels of five minute data every 24 hours (approximately four million intervals per month). This data is coming in from 30 distribution substations in the service area. Additional stations are being added every month and it is planned to have all the substations on line by the end of this year.

Fibre-Optic Network

Tacoma Power is working in partnership with Siemens and Stark North America to bring the meter data back to Stark RT via their system-wide telecommunications network. This hybrid fibre-optic/co-axial network is in the process of being installed and will eventually link all 143,000 customers and substations.

In addition to the substations, Tacoma Power is using Stark RT exclusively for billing the largest industrial customers as well as a number of smaller commercial accounts. “Our utilities billing process has been greatly complicated due to our area’s struggle with the federal deregulation of our industry”, continued Gillespie.

“Using Stark coupled with Siemens smart meters has allowed our Billing and Power Marketing departments to successfully respond to the increasingly complicated demands by both our internal customers (Engineering, Planning and Power Marketing) and external revenue providing customers”. At the moment between $70m and $80m in revenue per year is being billed exclusively with Stark – a number that Gillespie says will grow over the next few years.

Fulfilled Expectations

Now, six years down the line, Joe Gillespie and his team feel that the product has lived up to their expectations and are looking forward to working further with Stark North America for future projects.