A Significant Smart Meter Announcement

Yesterday, Landis+Gyr announced a four-year advanced metering contract with Texas utility Oncor. Under the agreement, Oncor will deploy a next generation Landis+Gyr advanced meter system (AMS) to three million homes and small businesses in Texas. Landis+Gyr indicates that this will be the largest deployment of smart meters in Texas, and one of the largest in the country. I did some digging and found some other examples of smart meter deployments in the U.S.:

• PGE looks to be doing one of the largest smart meter deployments in California, as they expect to deploy 9.3 million among their electric and gas customers.
• A company called Itron Inc. is supplying advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solutions to utilities such as Southern California Edison (Edison plans to automate 5.3 million meters from 2009 through 2012) and Texas-based CenterPoint Energy (up to 250,000 meters installed beginning in the second half of 2009, and an option to install up to two million meters total). Itron recently announced that its OpenWay CENTRON® solid-state electricity meter and OpenWay Gas Module are now ZigBee certified products.
• Georgia Power expects to have 400,000 smart meters deployed by the end of 2008.
• Florida Power & Light successfully tested 50,000 test meters, and is now installing another 50,000 in Broward County.

According to The Dallas Morning News, Oncor Electric Delivery plans to file for regulatory permission today to replace all of its meters with the smart meters. The meters would provide automatic meter readings every 15 minutes, and allow the company to anticipate grid problems before outages occur. To pay for the meters, Oncor will propose charging around $2.35 per household, each month, for the next 11 years. Oncor officials say that homeowners will make up this rental cost through energy savings. They indicate that homeowners may reduce energy usage by up to 5%.

As we wrote back in February, Texas has some the highest electricity rates in the country. This may go quite a ways in helping reduce consumption and overall costs.