LV power line carrier network system for AMR

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co., Inc.) has been researching several AMR (automatic meter reading) systems and introduced LV AMR system using telephone lines as a trunk line and LV power lines as a branch line among approximately 3000 customers at mountainous areas, where the electric power demand density is low and the meter reading efficiency is poor on account of no access other than on foot. During several years of commercial operation, we sometimes encountered an unavailability of reading the metering data due to the disconnection of telephone line, change in customer´s telephone number, etc. To solve these communication problems at a low cost and improve the automatic metering efficiency, we are developing a new LV AMR system with the regular communication route backed up by another telephone line and low voltage power line. This paper describes the features and performance of a conventional and newly developed AMR system