Ameren Illinois team recognized by AGA with research and innovation award
A three-member team at Ameren Illinois recently received national recognition from the American Gas Association (AGA) for developing a process that uses customer gas usage data to proactively identify natural gas leaks at customers’ residences.
“Our customers know the importance of calling us if they smell gas in and around the home,” said Eric Kozak, vice president of Natural Gas Operations for Ameren Illinois. “This project demonstrated that we could leverage advanced metering data for early detection and do even more to ensure customer safety.”
The process, created by Ameren’s Jeff Berry, Scott Lithgow, and Scott Hixson, pulls natural gas usage data from a customer’s advanced meter and flags usage patterns indicative of a potential natural gas leak.
In its first year of implementation, 93 gas leaks were identified before the customers noticed and reported it to the utility, says Ameren, which then contacted each customer and performed a leak investigation prior to crews arriving to make any necessary repairs.
“Congratulations to Jeff Berry, Scott Hixson, and Scott Lithgow for this well-deserved honor,” Kozak said.
The 2024 AGA Research and Innovation Award is presented to an individual, group, or company who has made an outstanding contribution to improving the natural gas system safety, delivery, design, construction, operation, maintenance, efficiency, or environmental footprint through their research and/or innovation efforts, according to the association.
AGA said it recognized Hixson, Lithgow, and Berry for their contributions to the Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) Analytics Process Improvement initiative on customer safety at Ameren Illinois.
Specifically, the winning team’s design focused on developing parameters for using existing AMI data to develop an algorithm that detects irregular natural gas usage, evaluates irregularities and dispatches field responders, responds to customer premises, and conducts investigations of natural gas facilities unreported or unprompted by the customer; and reporting investigation results and overall status of the initiative to stakeholders, according to Ameren Illinois.
“The process helped to proactively identify irregular usage that could indicate a hazardous situation with residential customers’ gas facilities,” AGA said in its 2024 Operations Conference summary, noting that the process the Ameren team developed is scalable across the natural gas utility sector.
“The efforts of this team yielded results that were highly anticipated, potentially lifesaving, and provided unforeseen opportunities to inform customers of anomalous gas usage due to circumstances unrelated to gas leaks,” the summary states. “This initiative is a testament to the effective collaboration between Ameren Illinois employees focused on enhancing safety.”
AMI is an integrated network system that enables a two-way flow of information between utilities and customers. Since 2014, Ameren has installed 1.2 million electric and more than 800,000 natural gas smart devices at customer premises.
