Welcome to APEX Data Consulting, your resource for turning critical financial and business data into more meaningful strategic and tactical information. We make it easier to access and manage your data across a broad range of planning, reporting and analytical requirements, and focus on two practice areas: Business Data Solutions and Energy Theft Protection.
APEX Data Consulting works with organizations to assess their information system needs, trouble-shoot problems, and recommend and implement enhancements that significantly improve operational and decision-making effectiveness. We develop and help you deploy solutions using a combination of database, spreadsheet, analytical modeling and other tools. The result: streamlined information gathering and management, plus new and more meaningful analytical insights across a wide variety of business operations.
Business Data Solutions
Turning Data into Meaningful Information
Improve Operational Decision-Making
A Virtual Team
Utility Safety and Energy Theft Protection
Improve Revenues, Load Management and Grid Safety
APEX Data Consulting offers a grid-wide data analytics service that ensures every meter can be remotely reviewed and analyzed on a weekly basis to quickly and easily identify and mitigate the risks of problems including:
· Power-diversion fraud and associated losses from uncaptured past and future revenues
· Faulty secondary connections that impact safety and operational integrity
· GIS Mapping errors that prevent accurate transformer load monitoring
Utilities that commit to systematically identifying these problems can significantly improve their grid’s safety, efficiency and profitability.
A Combination of Art and Science
APEX Data Consulting’s service finds theft, faulty connections and safety risks that are revealed through voltage anomalies — a proven technique based on electrical science that was used to successfully identify 700+ cases of energy diversion or meter integrity problems at Modesto Irrigation District between 2012 and 2017.
Usually performed manually on a transformer-by-transformer basis, voltage analytics has been extremely difficult to implement because no software tools exist that can automatically isolate and assess low-voltage outliers and determine their root cause. APEX solves this problem by applying custom filtering/correlation algorithms and queries across a utility’s extremely large Smart Grid data sets, leveraging our in-depth understanding of the top dozen voltage interrelationships among and between meters and transformers that signal safety or theft issues. We continuously iterate and refine our algorithms and queries as meter-to-transformer interrelationships and diversion techniques evolve.
Proven Success, Immediate ROI
The APEX Data Consulting meter analytics service pays for itself – and then some. Our costs to recover energy loss and stop future theft are far less than the dollar amount that can be recovered, and the service simultaneously delivers other benefits including identifying safety risks from faulty connections and mapping errors that hinder load management systems.
Our service begins paying for itself immediately because of the high success rate of our techniques and how prevalent energy diversions are, industrywide. With the average utility experiencing diversions in at least 1% of its meters at an average loss of $12,000 to $15,000 each in revenues, our service covers its costs even if revenues are recovered from only five diversions in the first month and two additional diversions each month thereafter.
Over the course of a year, the typical 100,000-meter utility using our service can realize from $12 million to $15 million in recaptured revenues — a nearly 400x ROI from back billings, alone, not counting the incremental revenue from new, higher streams after diversions are corrected.
The Value and Promise of Meter Voltage Analytics
Like all utilities, the electric grid infrastructure is at risk of fraud when customers divert power from the line side of the revenue meter. Until smart meters were installed, this fraud went undetected during billing reads and even by meter readers who would visit properties each month to read the meter and visually inspect the utility’s equipment located on the customer’s property. Diverted loads are often hidden behind customers’ walls or buried below ground and, when undetected, continue unabated.
Costs are passed on to rate payers who, on average, pay an additional $120 per year to make up for the cost of theft in the typical 100,000-meter example.
SMART grid meter voltage analytics provides the opportunity to stop this fraud by exposing various types of anomalies that are strongly associated with diverted loads. This approach simultaneously delivers other capabilities including:
- Optimizing transformer operational integrity-efficiency: Voltage analytics enables utilities to verify that transformers aren’t exceeding their KVA limit, and allows them to evaluate transformer duty cycles and correct mismapping of meters to transformers.
- Increasing safety: Diverted wires with no secondary voltage protection are very hazardous, and any type of short on the utility side of the meter has the potential to act as an arc welder and continue to burn, as there are no breakers for auto shut-off. Voltage analytics can identify opportunities to prevent fire or electrocution at the meter, while also protecting utility employees who must investigate overheated transformers.
- Improving service: in addition to cutting theft-related costs, utilities can use voltage analytics to prevent damage to rate payers’ connected electrical equipment and associated liability due to large diverted loads and faulty secondary connections, and to improve service quality by preempting transformer overuse, overheating and unplanned outages.
- Aligning with sustainability initiatives: The headlines are full of stories about state/local initiatives to offset high energy usage by marijuana cultivators and other residences above 600% of baseline. Marijuana growers, in particular, may not be willing or able to invest in carbon offsets and transformer upgrades these initiatives require, increasing the likelihood of diversion.
Adding voltage analytics to a SMART Grid technology toolkit delivers a variety of benefits that are paid for through the technique’s high rate of success in identifying diversions so that utilities can recover revenues.
APEX Sample Successes
Utility Safety and Energy Theft Protection
While Gary Fromm was with Modesto Irrigation District leading its transition to smart metering, he was simultaneously researching new methods for leveraging grid data to help identify energy theft. One of the most promising early approaches was the use of meter voltage analytics, which enabled him to find his first major 100 amp diverted load within the first three days of data review and charting areas of high standard deviation across the utility’s transformers.
At first, meter voltage analytics was performed manually on a hit-and-miss basis, transformer by transformer. Gary and Rick began working together to automate the process, testing a variety of data correlations and associated queries against the utility’s large data sets, and how well they brought back only the meters most likely to have fraud or connection problems that needed further investigation. As these data analytics techniques were refined, results improved to the point that all results exposed problems that required resolution and MID was identifying approximately 100 diverted loads per year and recapturing $2.6 billion in associated revenues, annually.
Utility Connection-Fee Planning and Analysis
Created and managed models for projecting utility connection-fee costs, revenues, cash flows and capital needs for a 30-year capital budget plan used to negotiate fee options and adjustments.
Automated Building Energy Auditing
Created a data gathering and analysis system for performing comprehensive facility energy-usage audits.
Real Estate Supply-and-Demand Forecasting
Developed modeling and scenario-planning tools that were used to project occupancy/lease rates, home demand and pricing, and market rebound predictors. Managed ongoing re-calibration of 7-year statistical forecasting model that performed to within 2.5% of actual results.
Investment Performance Analysis
Created a system for measuring historical and pro forma returns on gross book investment (GBI), current value, and internal rates of return (IRR), with tools for reviewing performance across multiple criteria.
Office Development/Leasing Business Planning
Created a forecasting tool with menu-based report-generation and analysis tools that accelerated and improved the accuracy of current and historical reporting and forecasting.
Home Buyer Survey Development
Designed SQL database to enable reporting of a nation wide home buyer survey. Survey consisted of over 90 questions (yes/no, multiple choice, multiple answers, ranking questions) with over 35,000 responses. Reports were required to be delivered in Microsoft Excel® format with the options to be able to query for any metro, zip code/multiple zip codes, builder and many other variables.
Enhanced Reporting for Sales, Marketing and Operations
Sample projects include:
- Utility energy monitoring/reporting: Helped develop back-end, Excel-based reporting tools for monitoring and analyzing the success of a new two-way, IP-based networking communication infrastructure for Smart Grid deployment.
- Land inventory reporting: Created multi-database, geo-coded system with visual representations of land-use type, value, status and plans.
- Retail center lease marketing tool: Used a GIS reporting system that provided lease prospects with a detailed visual representation of key demographic information near selected retail centers. The retail trade areas could be defined by an example drawn on a map, streets, radius in miles or minutes of estimated drive time.
Process Optimization
Sample projects include:
- Residential new home sales/closings reporting: replaced manual reporting with fully automated, web-based database that cut 12 hours/week of data entry, improved report accuracy, and simplified access to detailed transaction history.
- Employment tracking and reporting: simplified task of gathering, consolidating and reporting employment data in selected markets, replacing a week of manual entry with a 15-minute, fully automated push-button process.
- Residential pricing: home re-sale tracking system replaced 6 hours of manual work with push-button process. Automatically queried MLS database, created summary by product and pricing, and geo-coded information for easy visualization.
- Contact/Property Database cleanup – implementation: a system implementation for consolidating dozens of databases spanning hundreds of thousands of contacts, making it easier for property management firm to identify lease candidates and available properties.
Advantage
No one can see around corners. But just like professional race car drivers who know how to hit the apex of each curve, businesses can get through each turn more quickly and accurately if they have the information they need to achieve the straightest line and maximum speed to their objectives.
Harvesting this information from business and financial data systems can be extremely challenging for organizations of all sizes. Too often, small business owners who can’t afford a large IT staff are stuck with solutions that solve only a portion of their unique challenges. Larger companies face similar challenges, since IT teams often don’t know any more about complex business challenges than business teams know about sophisticated software capabilities. The result is far too much manual entry, redundant and/or disconnected data sets, incomplete information, and missed opportunities to optimize data performance across the full range of forecasting, reporting, analysis and other critical business operations.
APEX Data Consulting fills this gap, giving company owners, department managers and finance teams a unique resource for significantly improving the quality, availability and usefulness of critical business and financial information.
Software Experience
Rick draws on extensive software knowledge to pick the right blend of tools for the task. He works with clients to extend the power and capabilities of Microsoft® Excel® across a variety of analytical and reporting requirements, and integrates these tools with Microsoft Access® and/or SQL for projects such as smart grid revenue-protection analytics that involve larger data sets. He also leverages a wide variety of other tools to create a more complete picture for his clients, including mapping software like ESRI GIS for comprehensive data visualization, and statistical tools like EViews for econometric analysis, forecasting and simulation.
Who We Are
Rick Fromm
Rick founded APEX Data Consulting in 2011 after 35 years with organizations including The Irvine Company and Flour Corporation, where he helped business teams get more out of their data while significantly enhancing planning, reporting and other business system efficiency. With his unique blend of background in finance, accounting, business operations, IT management, system definition and deployment, and data-mining creativity, he has implemented a number of time- and money-saving initiatives for companies in a variety of industries including energy, construction, land development, and real estate sales, investment and management.
Gary Fromm
With over 40 years of experience in the electric utility industry, Gary was responsible for implementing the smart metering system for Modesto Irrigation District (MID). While he was with MID, he also developed and implemented a proven method for finding load diversions and other connection problems that are exposed through an analysis of low-voltage anomalies. Gary has spoken at numerous conferences on the topic of voltage analytics to find fraud and improve grid safety, and was the Western State Utility Theft Association (WSUTA) Revenue Protection Professional of the Year in 2014.
Utility Practice Resources
WASUTA Presentation
Selling to Management the importances of voltage analytics
WASUTA Presentation
Start by sanitizing your data
White Paper
Request our white paper on the value and promise of meter voltage analytics
Power Grid International
Article about how Voltage Analytics can help stop the dangers of energy theft.