GasSelect licensed to Peoples Gas; Chicago utility acquires license for SoCalGas gas scheduling...

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 3, 1996--Southern California Gas Co. has reached an agreement to license its nationally recognized software, GasSelect, to Peoples Gas Light and Coke Co., the natural gas utility serving the city of Chicago.

SoCalGas, the nation's largest gas distribution

"This marks SoCalGas' first success in marketing its GasSelect product," said Ed Vera, senior market analyst for SoCalGas. "We are marketing the software to other companies nationwide."

Peoples Gas has 843,000 Chicago customers, 11,000 of whom acquire their own gas supplies and rely upon the utility's distribution lines for delivery. The utility plans to modify the GasSelect software to meet its business needs.

GasSelect is a fully automated gas scheduling and energy management software package.

Subscribers to the service go on-line: for real-time submission of nominations, to advertise and trade gas delivery imbalances with other users, to obtain meter usage information from electronic meters, to plot trends from built-in charts and graphs and to receive up-to-the-minute news, rates and information from the bulletin boards and e-mail.

GasSelect was ranked 20th among the top 100 client-server computer applications in the nation by InfoWorld Magazine in its annual survey published in September 1995.

SoCalGas uses GasSelect to manage the transportation and delivery of customer and utility-owned natural gas supplies (1 trillion cubic feet annually) into its service territory.

SoCalGas charges subscribers for use of the service: marketers/ aggregators pay a flat rate of $415 per month and customers, $47 a month. Both pay 45 cents per minute for on-line time.

The terms of the agreement were not released.

CONTACT: Southern California Gas Co., Los Angeles

Denise King, 213/244-3030