Today’s Energy Theft Detection Models Help Protect Revenues While Enhancing Neighborhood Safety

People who turn valves that only the utility should operate, or who install unauthorized connections to divert gas around meters and into their homes or businesses are not only breaking the law, they are also endangering property and lives. Tampering with a gas meter or natural gas line could cause property damage and fatal injury from asphyxiation, explosion or fire.

The danger exists not just to the person who did the tampering but also to the structure and its occupants, neighboring premises and to utility and service personnel.

Unauthorized use of energy affects all customers through higher costs. Each year, usage without the utilities’ knowledge through meters that have been bypassed or tampered with result in the loss of billions of dollars worth of lost energy. That can mean higher prices for trusted customers as utilities try to recover revenue for energy that was used but never reported.

The following should motivate LDCs to identify and shutoff gas thieves: (1) public safety, (2) lost revenues, (3) desire to reduce consumer billing rates, (4) community responsibility, (5) desire for more accurate information baselines for local distribution companies’ (LDCs) rate cases to state public utility commissions (PUCs), (6) liability and (7) gas emissions standards.

Traditionally, utilities have relied on meter readers and service personnel for tips on gas theft. Meter readers, visiting each meter every month to collect a reading, made for a very effective line of defense against theft. However, with the advent of automatic meter reading (AMR) and advanced meter infrastructure (AMI), the meter reader is being replaced with technology and the utility has lost its eyes and ears in the field.

AMR and AMI systems provide tamper flags that identify energy theft when the tampering occurs at the meter, and while they can alert the utility to a theft case, they also can trigger far too many false alarms. According to a Chartwell research report, “AMR is not a perfect system for detecting theft and many customers have discovered this, coming up with clever ways to bypass or tamper with the meter without triggering a tamper flag. Plus, some of the utilities consulted for this report say tamper flags do not always indicate theft, but are a product of oversensitivity and benign outside forces.”

The only way to identify theft in this situation is to clearly understand how each customer should use natural gas and focus on those who deviate from expected consumption.

Knowing The Customer
Knowing the customer is vital. Typically, utility data consists of the account holder’s name, phone number, address and--for commercial accounts--type of business and maybe the name of the business. The utility may know a client account is a restaurant, for example, but probably doesn’t know how large the premise is or whether it is a sit-down or take-out establishment. For commercial accounts, additional information such as the number of employees, chain affiliation and other metered services on the account need to be a part of any intelligent usage analysis. For residential accounts, knowledge of the size of premise and heating sources is also very valuable.

Understanding the characteristics of an account provides valuable insight into the customer’s use of gas. With this insight, energy usage can be compared to a group of “like peers” with similar characteristics and outliers can be flagged for further analysis and investigation.