Metering.com 21 NOVEMBER 2016
Superior Water, Light and Power (SWL&P) secured approval from the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin to implement an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) project.
SWL&P’s approved smart metering project includes the replacement of existing analog water, gas and electric meters with smart meters over a period of five years.
The five-year AMI plan falls under utility’s efforts to optimise its revenue collection and customer services through accurate water, electric and gas billing.
SWL&P provides services to 15,000 electric customers, 12,000 natural gas customers and 10,000 water customers.
The smart meters will help the company in reducing its non-revenue water and gas through quick identification of water and gas leakages.
SWL&P will be able to detect meter tampering with the new smart electric meters.
More importantly, SWL&P will take advantage of the new metering system to improve management of its distribution networks by having access to how the networks operate in real-time.
The approval of SWL&P’s plan to deploy smart meters comes as 60% of gas, electric and water meters in the US are AMI.
In a press statement, SWL&P said it will implement the smart metering project in phases to deploy up to 30,000 smart meters by 2020.
The company will develop a web-portal on which its customers can access their usage data and pay bills online using mobile devices.
Rob Sandstrom, manager at SWL&P, said: “This project will be the platform upon which SWL&P can provide new and innovative services to our customers in the future.”
Smart metering project deployment
In the second quarter of 2016, the City of Eudora in Kansas kickstarted the rollout of an AMI project to modernise its water and electricity networks.
Under the $2.51 million AMI project, the city is installing smart water and electric meters for accurate and remote meter readings in a bid to curb non-revenue losses.
The smart meters will allow the city’s utilities’ departments employ water and energy efficiency programmes for networks’ reliability.
In addition to the AMI, the city is also replacing its existing street and municipal building’s lights with LED lights as well as upgrade heating and air conditioning systems. [Illinois utility to install smart meters for gas and electric customers]
To accelerate the rollout of the smart water meters, the city partnered with a local engineering company 360 Energy Engineers, reported a local publication.