Qualitech Solutions

New Horizon, located in Laurens, South Carolina, is a Generation and Transmission (G&T) Cooperative that provides electric power to northwestern South Carolina. New Horizon was formed in the early 1980s to provide generation, transmission, and power supply services to its five members: Blue Ridge, Broad River, Laurens, Little River and York Electri... c Membership Cooperatives (EMCs). These five cooperatives serve approximately 150,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers with a peak demand of about 700 megawatts. With deregulation and increasing demand New Horizon began to evaluate ways of reducing costs and meeting demand efficiently. This meant concentrating on wholesale power costs, which are usually well over 90% of a Utilities total costs. In New Horizons case this meant changing power suppliers completely to take advantage of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions (FERCs) policy for wholesale deregulation. In order to dynamically purchase from Duke Energy and South Carolina Public Service Authority (SCPSA), New Horizon would have to develop a real-time method of purchasing this energy, commonly known as Dynamically Scheduling. Since electricity does not lend itself to storage very easily, electricity is purchased most cheaply if you can notify the generation supplier immediately of your energy needs. New Horizon would have to monitor their energy usage at every point where they take delivery of energy, over 100 transmission grid connection meters. Now that New Horizon had information being gathered by LiveData, they needed a way to dynamically track, total and communicate their total usage to both their former supplier, Duke energy, and their future supplier, SCPSA. To gather the real time usage data from 100 meters every 4 seconds. To write this information to a database in real time. To gather load profile (actual hourly usage) data from meters for comparison to the 4 second usage data. To query all this historical usage information via a Web Browser. To gather and communicate this ...Read More