Metering News

The Arizona Corporation Commission has reopened the record in a pending docket on advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to examine safety and health concerns regarding smart meters. In so doing, the commission said it was particularly interested in seeing any health studies that have been conducted since the evidentiary phase of the case had closed. The commission related that such submissions would help it determine if there was a compelling reason to continue the fact-gathering process before proceeding to the deliberations phase.

The City of Georgetown, Texas, chose Elster’s EnergyAxis for its system-wide, multi-utility meter replacement project. Georgetown will deploy Elster's EnergyAxis solution throughout its service territory and install 21,000 each of Elster’s water and electricity meters.

Piedmont Municipal Power Agency (PMPA) selected Tantalus to provide the communications network for its smart grid system. PMPA is a joint agency formed by 10 municipal utilities in northwestern South Carolina.

Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska (MEAN) contracted Open Systems International (OSI) to supply a new SCADA and generation management system (GMS) based on OSI’s monarch (Multi-platform Open Network ARCHitecture) platform.

Commonwealth Utilities Corp. (CUC) in Saipan ordered two-way electric meters with Nighthawk communications technology. The meters are expected to enable a pre-paid metering system to improve collections and cash flow. CUC also expects the meters’ voltage monitoring to provide better information about system status in remote locations.

Lower Yellowstone Rural Electric Association signed an agreement to deploy Gridstream PLX, Landis+Gyr’s power line carrier system for advanced metering and grid management. L+G says Gridstream PLX provides greater data capacity than legacy PLC systems, for delivering 15-minute interval data continuously from each meter on the network. Sidney, Mt.-based Lower Yellowstone REA is a cooperative serving residents of northeastern Montana and parts of North Dakota. The deployment is scheduled to begin this spring.

Echelon was selected to provide smart grid systems for the Smart Grid Gotland project, a large-scale, technology demonstration on the island of Gotland, Sweden. The project is sponsored by a joint venture between Vattenfall, Gotland Energy, ABB, Swedish National Grid, Schneider Electric, and the Royal Institute of Technology, and and is partly financed by the Swedish Energy Agency. Echelon will provide its edge control node, its control operating system (COS) -based application platform, and 3,000 advanced grid sensors, which also provide smart metering functionality.

IBM was selected to operate Independent Electricity System Operator Ontario’s meter data management and repository (MDM/R) system with new computing infrastructure and an updated operating environment. The five-year, $68.5 million contract includes options to extend to seven or 10 years. Under the agreement, IBM will develop the overall performance of the MDM/R through new computing and networking infrastructure, disaster recovery capabilities, and operational improvements to reduce risk and costs.

LaGrange County REMC began deploying a Sensus FlexNet utility network and iCon A electric meters for its more than 7,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers across parts of four counties in northern Indiana. The utility recently concluded construction and installation of its five base stations. LaGrange made a decision to forego a pilot program and move straight into implementation, which is expected to be fully complete within the next five to six years as legacy meters are replaced with digital meters from Sensus.