More Smart Meters Rolling Out in American West

Saturday, 13 March 2010 10:10

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As more smart meter deployments are planned for the American west, utility executives worry about how to effectively and efficiently collect and analyze the avalanche of data that will eventually be generated by the smart electric technology.

Southern California Edison (SCE) has begun installing smart electric meters throughout the San Gabriel Valley, located east of Los Angeles, as part of the Edison SmartConnect program. Starting in Q3 of 2010, utility customers will be able to view their energy usage from a computer, cell phone, or other electronic device to track how much they use and how much it costs.

Ken Devore, director of the SmartConnect program says Edison has spent several years developing and testing their smart meters to ensure their quality and performance. “Installing these new meters is key to providing our customers with new programs and services that will help them to become smarter energy consumers.”

The deployment will continue through 2012 for nearly five million SCE residential and small-business customers. So far SCE, which has a 50,000-square-mile service territory, has installed nearly 300,000 meters. The SmartConnect initiative is a $1.6 billion program authorized by the California Public Utilities Commission.  In Nevada, NV Energy has received $138 million in United States federal stimulus funding to help subsidize a new smart-grid energy system that has a total price tag of $301 million.

The increased deployment of smart meters has some utilities concerned over possible data overload. The western U.S. is leading the world in the installation of smart-grid synchronized phasors, which will stream information about power supplies into central data centers every 30th of a second. Current sensors provide information from the grid every 4 seconds. SCE anticipates its synchro-phasor rollout will be the largest of any utility in the U.S.

“We’re trying to plan ahead,” says Paul De Martini, vice president of advanced technology, but admits, “I don’t know how to handle the information.” De Martini anticipates that by 2020, 10 million devices will be on his network, only five million of which will be meters.

Jim Detmers, vice president of operations at California ISO, the agency in charge of running California’s electric transmission grid notes, “We’re up to the limits of the machines in place today.” But he’s confident that once SCE and other utilities figure out the logistics of the massive information flow, their solution will be “the template for how it could be rolled out across the country.”