Patent Document ID: 9601004
Application ID: 13532160
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer implemented method for estimating energy consumption of an entire utility population of participants in a demand response program by sampling meters of statistically representative groups at different time intervals, the method comprising: a processor for organizing the entire utility population comprising energy consumers into a plurality of groups, wherein each member of a group has one or more similar features that relate to a single utility, each member having a meter for measuring consumption of the single utility and which is coupled only to a meter-based communications network in which each meter comprises an antenna for radio-frequency communications; a processor for calculating a distribution of energy consumption against the plurality of groups; a processor for forming the statistically representative groups based on the distribution of energy consumption and the plurality of groups, a total number of members for all of the statistically representative groups having a magnitude which is smaller than the total utility population of all participants in the demand response program, each statistically representative group is formed such that when energy measurements for members of the statistically representative groups are added together to produce a group total, an estimated performance for the entire utility population is calculated by the processor from the group total; a processor for collecting data from the statistically representative groups at predefined time intervals from the meters coupled to the meter-based communications network, the data collected from the meters of the statistically representative groups being less than collecting data from the entire utility population, the processor collects the data from each statistically representative group at a designated different single predefined time interval relative to each statistically representative group within all of the statistically representative groups, the processor collecting data from meters of each statistically representative group at a different predefined time interval and the processor collecting data from only meters of statistically representative groups instead of the entire utility population substantially reduces communications bandwidth consumed by the processor over the meter-based communications network while also reducing a number of calculations needed to estimate energy consumption of the entire utility population; and a processor for estimating energy consumption of the entire utility population based on the data collected from the meters of the statistically representative groups.