GEORGE NEWS - George Municipality is the first electricity provider in the country to pilot freely licensed software that automates the reading, processing, and billing of electricity smart meter data.
The wheeling pilot that was approved by Council and offered limited wheeling as a service is open to everyone who wants to wheel energy.
Wheeling is the delivery of electricity generated by a private operator in one location to a buyer or off-taker in another location via a third-party network (utility or municipality).
The first wheeling transaction took place in May 2022 at George Municipality, following the signing of the use-of-system agreements in July 2021.
Recognising a need
The billing process has for many years been done manually, requiring extensive time for verification and preparation of bills once the data was retrieved from the meters.
"The need for this freely licensed software pilot became evident when we considered the scaling of wheeling and renewable energy on the George Municipality's electricity grid," said Bongani Mandla, Director of Electrotechnical Services at George Municipality.
"The manual billing process was one of the main challenges and resolving this meant reducing reliance and pressure on key human resources, reducing potential errors that could occur in the billing process. Engagement with Open Access Energy on showcasing their software that they license for free, has assisted in addressing the challenge for us and we are now piloting the automation of our metering and billing services."
Two wheeling products
According to Gerjo Hoffman, chief executive officer and co-founder of Open Access Energy, the software company aims to boost the use of renewable energy by simplifying wheeling.
"Our products aim to automate wheeling and serve the needs of anyone that wants to wheel energy. Our initial focus is South Africa, but our future aspiration is to offer solutions in all emerging markets globally," says Hoffman.
Open Access Energy currently has two products in the market. Access Energy is a freely licensed software solution that reads smart meters, stores the meter data in a meter data sharing system, and exposes that data to municipalities. The software allows the municipality to create and load their electricity tariffs and then apply them to a bill. The final bill is sent to the municipalities' enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which then sends the bill to the end customer.
Read more on sister publication, George Herald
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