Company

Headquartered in Seoul, KEPCO (Korean Electric Power Corporation) is the leading energy company in South Korea. KEPCO has been associated with the growth of Korea's energy infrastructure for over 119 years. It is highly respected for its role in the evolution of South Korea into one of the most spectacular economic success stories. It provides electricity primarily to industrial, commercial, and residential customers, as well as to educational, agricultural, and street lighting customers.

KEPCO serves over 180,000 C&I customers with peak demands of more than 100kW. Looking at it from a dollars and cents perspective, that number represents more than 50 percent of KEPCO's total revenue, although it's less than one percent of its total customer base.

Situation

KEPCO's goal is to provide abundant electric power and to develop high quality and reliable power resources to South Korea's mushrooming businesses and households. As a result of that growth, there is dramatically escalating demand for energy.

KEPCO's management realized early on that its energy operations based on antiquated analog meters and manual meter reading was posing severe problems in a number of ways. At the top of the list were non-optimum business process efficiencies and distribution asset management, resulting in less than adequate customer service and lost revenues. Customer billing information was not as accurate or comprehensive as KEPCO wanted it to be. The maximum number of meters a meter reader could read was seven a day because it was physically difficult to visit many customer sites. Meanwhile, KEPCO's operational costs were constantly jumping to higher levels. In addition, there were the large organizations of meter readers -- personnel that KEPCO felt could be re-trained to make greater customer contributions. In short, KEPCO sought to enhance its customer service and streamline its energy operations by building a new high performance automatic metering system.

KEPCO sought the guidance and expertise of world-renowned Nuri Telecom to find ways to significantly automate energy operations for its C&I customer base.

Architecting the Solution

Working in close collaboration with KEPCO and keeping their requirements in mind, Nuri architected an end-to-end, two-way AMR communications system enabling KEPCO to remotely read individual meters at any time on demand. The solution was designed for KEPCO to remotely collect metering, power quality and efficiency data periodically from its 140,000 C&I customers throughout the country using Nuri's AiMiR C&I AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) technology. The system was designed with the utmost flexibility to support locally manufactured Nuri technology enabled smart electricity meters from eight different manufacturers. KEPCO decided to use a CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) wireless network to connect C&I meters to the AiMiR Head End servers located at its data centers.

Furthermore, KEPCO's AiMiR system was designed with scalability considerations for future integration with KEPCO's NDIS (New Distribution Information System) and NCIS (New Customer Information System) as well as other business information systems for effective and timely business management.

Nuri's AiMiR C&I AMI system solution consists of:

• Nuri Technology enabled smart meters
• Automatic remote meter reading using digital cellular modems
• AiMiR Head End servers
• Metering, Meter Data Management and Network Management Software
• Meter data integration services for billing system
• EBPP (Electronic Bill Printing & Payment) services for KEPCO customers