Electric deregulation impacts on metering, billing and customer information systems

Electric industry deregulation is approaching in many states, bringing with it enormous changes in the way that distribution utilities handle information within their customer information, metering and billing systems. Traditional utility metering and billing processes could largely become a thing of the past when such concepts as retail open access, 3/sup rd/ party metering and competitive billing services become the norm. In addition, distribution utilities will be required to develop electronic data interchange capabilities with many other entities that did not exist prior to the advent of retail competition. This paper examines a number of business processes in the retail electric market and explores the information that will be required to implement those processes.