Meralco (Manila Electric Company), headquartered in Pasig City, the Philippines, will deploy Itron’s MV-90 xi software system in the Philippines Islands.
“It was clear that MV-90xi was an important part of Meralco’s move toward an AMR system,” said Doug Staker, vice president and general manager of Itron’s International Market Group. “This creates a partnership between Itron and Meralco that will be long-lasting while providing greater efficiency throughout the country.”
Meralco is the largest utility in the Philippines, serving 4.3 million customers in 25 cities and 86 municipalities. Meralco’s business establishments in the franchise produced almost 49% of the Philippine’s gross domestic product.
In preparation for deregulation, Meralco is implementing customer load profiling and remote meter reading as corporate strategies for competitive advantage. Currently, load profile data retrieval is done manually on selected customer accounts because of manpower constraints.
Project Managers Eugene F. Araullo and Aris Lumague said it was the challenges that brought on the need for automatic meter reading, including the processing time required to validate and reconcile the load profile data as well as the existence of various types and brands of meters installed.
Meralco is eager to have the capabilities of retrieving detailed meter data from different brands of meter remotely, anytime, anywhere.
MV-90 xi is a solution for interval data collection, management and analysis and can be used as a data collection engine that interfaces to existing data management and analysis tools, or as an end-to-end interval data collection and management solution. MV-90 xi collects meter data from Itron handheld computers with or without radio, as well as from Itron Mobile Collection Systems.
