Chellow - Open Source Energy Bill Management software

Overview

Chellow is an Open Source Energy management application developed for checking both half hour and non half hourly electricity bills.

 

Users can download Chellow and run it themselves - or Meniscus host it on our own servers and offer the application as part of an electricity bill checking and data validation Bureau Service where we run and manage the application for you.

Physical model

Chellow holds a physical model of an organization's supplies containing all the information necessary to check bills including:

• Many-to-many mapping of sites and supplies.
• Supplies connected to generators (CHP, Load Management, Turbine).
• Supplies connected to the public distribution system.
• Third party supplies (where the supply goes from or to a third party, rather than the public distribution network).
• MPANs associated with each supply, together with their Agreed Supply Capacity and Standard Settlement Configuration. From the MPAN, Chellow works out: Voltage Level, Import / Export, Profile Class and Distribution Area.
• Chellow holds a history of the state of each supply.
• Half-hourly data (including kVAr, kWh, import and export)

The data can be uploaded using CSV files or entered manually using web forms.

A general philosophy behind Chellow is that any data entered is immediately checked for internal consistency with data already in Chellow. Inconsistent header data is immediately rejected, and errors in hh data are held in a dynamic list.

Half-hourly Data

HH data files can be imported manually, or with some custom programming can be downloaded automatically from the Data Collector's server. As mentioned earlier, errors in hh data are stored, and then if a subsequent upload corrects the error it automatically disappears. The errors detected by Chellow are channel level (negative values, estimates, missing data) and site level (exporting more than is being generated for example).

The error list is accessible via a URL and so can be made available to the Data Collector.

Virtual Bills

Chellow comes with the ability to calculate standard pass-through costs including:

• CCL
• TRIAD (including a facility for estimated TRIADs)
• VAT
• Hydro Charge

and the DUoS charges for DNO areas 14, 20 and 22:

• Availability
• DUoS Day and Night
• Reactive Power
• Standing Charge

With a custom script, the supplier tariff can be built on top of these pass-through charges to create virtual bills.

Chellow holds the Elexon Market Domain Data set. This means that for NHH supplies with HH data, Chellow uses the SSC to determine the timeslots for the energy tariff to create a virtual bill.

Bills

Bills from suppliers can be stored in Chellow, imported from a variety of formats including EDI and CSV. For NHH bills, register reads are stored as part of the bill.

Reports

Here are a few examples of reports that can be created and viewed from within Chellow:

• Graph of site usage
• Generation graph
• Monthly kWh, MD / kW, MD / kVA, Supply Capacity for each supply.
• Monthly site level report of Imported, Displaced and Used kWh and Imported £.
• Forecasting cost.