in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
Duquesne Light Company, the electric utility serving more than 600,000 customers in the Pittsburgh region of Pennsylvania, announced on 14 October 2026 that it is expanding its collaboration with Itron, Inc. to move from a first-generation advanced metering network to a platform built on grid edge intelligence, beginning with an initial deployment of 20,000 Itron distributed intelligence endpoints aimed at improving fault detection.
The announcement, distributed by Itron from its headquarters in Liberty Lake, Washington, describes a phased programme called OpenWay Forward, which Itron positions as an upgrade path from AMI 1.0, defined as meter-to-cash automation, to AMI 2.0, defined as grid orchestration. The 20,000 endpoints equal about 3.3 percent of the utility’s customer count of more than 600,000, a ratio that gives an indication of how narrow the first phase is relative to the full service territory.
An Existing Itron Network Becomes The Foundation
Duquesne Light already operates an Itron OpenWay smart meter network, and the new programme builds on that installed base rather than replacing it. The original relationship dates to 31 July 2013, when Itron announced that Duquesne Light had signed a contract, after approval by its board of directors and the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, to replace its 625,000 electricity meters with Itron smart meters across the service territory.
That 2013 scope covered meters, back-office data collection software, network communications infrastructure and professional services including consulting, meter exchange, project management and training. Itron said at the time that the meters were intended to meet the requirements of Act 129, the Pennsylvania law enacted in 2008 that set smart meter and efficiency obligations for the state’s larger electric distribution companies.
The October 2026 release also refers to Duquesne Light’s existing smart streetlight network, which places the utility’s connected assets in two categories: customer meters on the OpenWay network and lighting assets on a separate networked layer. The expansion is designed to add a third layer of analytics at the grid edge.
What Distributed Intelligence Adds To A Meter Network
Distributed intelligence endpoints run analytics locally, at the meter or the grid edge, instead of sending every reading to a central head-end system for processing. In Itron’s description of the Duquesne Light project, the endpoints are intended for fault detection, with the expected result being faster identification of outages and quicker crew response.
The utility also expects greater visibility into distributed energy resources and behind-the-meter activity, which covers rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicle charging that do not appear on a conventional meter-to-cash data feed. Near real-time visibility at the edge is the stated mechanism, with edge computing handling the processing close to the asset.
On the software side, the programme includes Itron’s UtilityIQ suite, which Itron describes as a universal head-end system that gives operators a single platform for operational data and insights. A universal head-end is relevant for a utility with more than one device generation in the field, because it allows older and newer endpoints to report into one application.
Benchmarks The Programme Will Be Measured Against
Utilities generally judge fault detection projects against reliability indices defined by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, in particular the System Average Interruption Duration Index and the System Average Interruption Frequency Index. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission collects these reliability figures from each electric distribution company in the state, so any improvement attributable to the new endpoints would appear in regulatory filings that are available for comparison with Duquesne Light’s own history.
The placement of the first 20,000 endpoints will therefore matter as much as their number. Feeders with a record of repeated momentary outages or long restoration times would offer the clearest test of whether local analytics shorten the interval between a fault and a dispatched crew, and the first reliability filing that covers a full year of operation of those endpoints will provide the earliest benchmark for deciding whether the remaining 580,000 customers follow in later phases.
