Automated electricity bill analysis in South Africa

Abstract

The ever-increasing cost of energy puts industries under pressure. Industries are forced to monitor their energy consumption and to manage energy more efficiently and responsibly. Some industrial companies have multiple operations spread out over a wide area, making it logistically difficult to get a holistic view of the company’s energy performance. Valuable information is freely available in the form of electricity bills. However, to benefit from the information in the bills, the data should be extracted and analysed, which is a time-consuming process. In this paper, a need for an automated centralised system that extracts and analyses electricity data from bills was identified. The methodology for extracting, organising, and presenting the electricity bill information is explained in detail. The system is implemented for a gold mining company, and the results are interpreted and discussed. It was found that the system is beneficial for companies with many operations. As the number of operations increases, the value of automated bill analysis increases.