The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘Smarter’ meters or fewer trees?
Eversource files plan for $600M power line response
A “smart” meter would not have kept the lights on three weeks ago, if you were the luckless victim of a tree toppling onto your neighborhood power lines — but it could have instantaneously alerted Eversource, perhaps allowing the utility to get your pocket of the grid back up a little more quickly.
On the heels of a July barrage of customer complaints of sky-high bills, Eversource filed for state regulatory review a $612 million proposal to invest in smart meters over the coming 20 years. Avangrid subsidiary United Illuminating also filed a plan to expand on its own network of smart meters dating back a decade.
Days after the filings, Tropical Storm Isaias pulverized the Connecticut grid, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers, some of them for a week. The Eversource meter overhaul would amount to more than seven times the $83 million it committed this year to pruning back trees and branches that threaten local power lines in Connecticut.
Similar in look to the cylindrical meters long sold by General Electric, Schlumberger and other companies — but with digital displays instead of spinning disks to track electric use — smart meters transmit wireless data to receivers installed on top of nearby utility poles. The meters allow customers to get “high bill” text alerts on their power consumption to tamp down the impact of any rate spike during peak periods when electric loads increase, such as hot summer days.
Smart meters also give utilities a better read on any excess electricity generated by solar panels on homes and businesses that
could flow back into the grid. And in its filing with the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, United Illuminating describes the value of the “data lake” the devices produce with cross-checks of electricity consumption several times an hour.
Nearly two decades ago, Eversource’s predecessor company Northeast Utilities spent three years installing automated meters that beam data over wireless links to utility vehicles on monthly loops past homes and commercial customers. While that was a vast improvement over the old system of having field employees eyeball meters to verify consumption, the new meters would eliminate those truck rolls entirely.
The Oregon utility Portland General Electric, whose board members include former Northeast Utilities CEO Charles Shivery, has 850,000 smart meters operational. PGE estimates the units have eliminated 1.1 million miles of meter rounds annually by its vehicles, saving more than $18 million that has trickled into lowering customer rates.
“Our current ... metering technology is nearing the end of its useful life,” said Phil Lembo, chief financial officer of Eversource, speaking late last month on a conference call. “We’ll need to replace about 800,000 meters, one way or another, over the next five years.”
But only two years ago, Eversource was unable to convince regulators in Massachusetts to approve the investment, which would be charged to customer bills. Virginia, Kentucky and New Mexico likewise have rejected mass smart meter conversions the past few years.
Storm ‘interrogation’ to speed fixes
Eversource has about 3,000 employees in Connecticut today, while having entered the year with an extra 1,350 workers on temporary contracts.
Today, about one of every two customer meters in the United States features advanced metering technology or a hybrid design allowing for such an upgrade. UI has more than 100,000 smart meters in use today made by Switzerland-based Landis+Gyr.
Many utilities pushed ahead with smart meters after receiving stimulus funds through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, including the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Cooperative whose members include South Norwalk Electric & Water.
The cooperative got half of the $18.4 million it needed to install more than 38,000 smart meters, with more than 5,600 SNEW residential customers having the devices along with more than 1,300 commercial properties.
In its PURA filing, Eversource maintains that remote “interrogation” of meters would be particularly helpful in such storms. Isaias overloaded the company’s outage reporting system as customers attempted to notify the utility via text, phone and an online web form, thus slowing down the utility’s response.
“In these events, power is restored first to the system backbone,” the company wrote in its proposal. “Typically, this leaves smaller pockets of outages undetected for a period of time, limiting the efficiency of restoration at the tail end of the event.”
Eversource has analyzed the costs and benefits of smart meters every few years since 2009, according to Jessica Brahaney Cain, vice president of customer operations, during a February hearing before a committee of the Connecticut General Assembly. At PURA’s request last year, the company assessed the options again, reaching the determination that the technology will pay for itself over time.
“We’ve been very cautious about smart meters, going back a decade-plus,” said Rich Sobolewski, acting consumer counsel for the state of Connecticut, who plans to weigh in on the utilities’ proposals. “I think moving to smart meters is inevitable at this point — it’s just how you are going to do it, and what you are going to design the system to do.”
At what cost?
In a January study, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy analyzed smart meters nationally for overall savings and itemized in some instances to individual customers.
The lone Northeast utility included in the study was Vermont’s Green Mountain Power, which reported that customers enrolled in peak-price rebate programs saved $50 annually on average. Green Mountain Power meters triggered rate reductions 14 times a year on average for customers that powered down appliances during peak power periods.
If a dollar in weekly savings does not sound like much, add it up across the operating life of Eversource’s meters today and it amounts to $1,000 per customer. And a utility software company called Bidgely noted to PURA last November that some consumers could get bigger savings, citing the example of a smart-meter alert to the hypothetical homeowner running up an extra few hundred dollars on summer bills by running a pool pump or recharging an electric vehicle during peak periods.
But some critics have questioned whether the digital meters will have the decades of reliability their analog technology forebears have demonstrated. Like any digital device, smart meters are governed by internal circuit boards which can be fried by nearby lightning strikes or other power surges. The regularity of the radio frequency waves meters emit are viewed by some as a possible health hazard.
And a Michigan electrical engineer named Bill Bathgate has been on a multi-state crusade questioning the accuracy of the meter readings themselves over time, claiming that consumers are “at the total mercy of the utility” in his words in any billing dispute.
“In the old days, they could say, ... ‘well, you gave me a reading that was really high, so let me go out to the side of the house and look at the dials, and see if it’s right. If it’s right, it’s right,’ ” Bathgate told Michigan legislators in 2018. “This thing, you have no clue. They could send you a bill tomorrow for $1,000 and say, ‘You owe it — or we’re going to shut you off.’ ”
Avangrid indicated last year to PURA that two external audits of a smart meter billing system it installed in Maine found no such discrepancies.