NES Benefits
Overview of the complete NES System
Reduce costs, improve operations, and generate new sources of income.
The NES System benefits every aspect of your utility’s operation — from metering and customer services to distribution operations and value-added business. We offer an unparalleled return on investment with a payback period for most utilities ranging from two and five years.
Direct Benefits
Metering
The NES System:
- enables completely automated scheduled reads of electric, gas, water, and heat meters
- allows real-time, on-demand reads
- eliminates most meter-reading costs for both scheduled and unscheduled reads, due to wage, insurance, equipment, office space, and vehicular cost savings
Customer Service
The NES system:
- reduces billing errors, complaints, and inquiries, as well as call center staff and related costs
- extends the use of flexible tariffs (available to commercial accounts) to residential customers, allowing new tariff structures to be remotely downloaded into meters, such as:
- time-of-use pricing
- critical peak pricing
- real-time pricing
- prepayment without card
- offers remote connect and disconnect features — useful in high-turnover environments such as apartments — that:
- eliminate costs associated with manually managing service connections
- increase customer satisfaction through improved response times
Distribution Operation
The NES System's detailed per-meter supply quality statistics, broad load-profiling capabilities, and extensive provisions for theft detection enable:
- load-balancing of meters and transformers
- improved energy forecasting and conservation
- blackout and brownout prevention
- comprehensive revenue protection
The system also:
- rapidly detects outages
- verifies service restoration while field crews are still in the area
Operating
The NES system:
- eliminates re-bills caused by incorrect reads or data entry errors
- eliminates the need for estimated bills
- improves cash flow by reducing read-to-bill turnaround and uncollectibles
- reduces unnecessary services calls and field investigations through remote monitoring
Regulatory
The NES system offers:
- power quality reporting for any subset of meters or service areas
- historical as well as on-demand outage and connection reporting for accurate calculation of service quality
- remotely configurable meter-reading capabilities by time, period, or service area to comply with changing regulations
Value-Added Benefits
Since the NES System is built on open, internationally recognized standards using existing infrastructures, your utility can add new devices over time — anywhere within the electricity network — using the same communication infrastructure already installed for electricity metering.
Products such as thermostats, boilers, appliances, air handlers, lights, and load control modules based on our LonWorks technology — the backbone of the NES system — are available from thousands of manufacturers worldwide. By adding communications and control over these devices, utilities can offer their customers or partners a number of benefits and services, such as:
- remote monitoring and control of in-premise devices such as thermostats and appliances
- predictive warranty services
- consumer use reports
