AMI Overtakes AMR Deployments by U.S. Water Utilities

When the town of Orleans, Massachusetts rolled out an AMI solution for its water system, it didn't take long to spot a problem. 400 gallon per hour leak. Now that's a lot of water for a resident. They never would have been able to do that by reading just a few times per year. But the AMI allows them to be much more proactive about finding those issues in their system. Advanced metering infrastructure provides constant updates on water. usage of a home or business. It gives utilities deep visibility into the entire water network. U.S. water utilities were slow to adopt the technology, but that's changed. We're deploying anywhere from two to four dense metropolitan networks for water metering every quarter now. And now with the election of President Joe Biden. We're gonna invest $2 trillion in infrastructure. AMI deployments will likely pick up and already we're seeing it. entirely new smart water market take shape. If I were a utility that hadn't deployed AMI, I might start to feel pretty bad about myself. AMI took off in the utility sector around 2005. It brought two-way communication to the market, an advancement to the way utilities collected data under an older version of the technology known as AMR, advanced meter reading. AMR requires drive-by data collection. That means a utility... worker has to physically collect the data using a car equipped with specialized radio receivers. AMI was seen as a game changer because it eliminated the need for utility worker to manually check a meter's water usage. As a result, we're seeing a more efficient workforce unfold with AMI, and a more proactive one. The other thing that AMI allows you to do, and this is something that Europe does a lot better than we do, is run what they call district metered. Let's say I've got a neighborhood, a large neighborhood of 1,000 homes, right? If I want to see if I have leaks in that distribution system, if I install a master meter and I install isolation valves where I have one inlet going into that area, right, and feeding these 1 ,000 homes here, I can do a comparison of the master meter against these, the aggregate of homes. The beauty of an AMI system is that those type of calculations looking at that distribution system. district metered area to compare that master meter against the aggregate of home can be done continuously. And all these benefits trickle down to the consumer, offering more precise billing, demand response capabilities, and customer alerts. However, we're told 70% of utilities still use AMR. AMI is expensive, and it's all about enabling a set of future benefits that aren't here I think it can be hard for regulators to see. see the case and it can be hard for utilities to articulate the case in a compelling way. I think that's gotten in the way a lot. But that's beginning to change as utilities feel the pressure of mounting environmental regulations and growing concerns around water scarcity. Two factors expected to gain momentum within the Biden administration. We'll bring America back, back into the Paris Agreement, and put us back in the business of leading the world on climate change again. Hundreds of agricultural organizations. and water districts have taken notice a national collision has already submitted a request for funding to address aging infrastructure it comes as new trends emerge among u .s utilities with ami deployments outnumbering amr for us that has been one of the fastest growing technologies that we've ever deployed now according to badger meter utilities are more open to investing in ami simply because it's become easier to deploy with the rise of lpwan technologies Well, in 2014, you may know that that's the time where cellular -based AMI systems have come to the marketplace. And with cellular-based AMI, you know, they're very simple. It's a technology you can literally hold in your hand. You just need the radio endpoint and the meter, and you've got an AMI system. A water meter puts out very little data and can use the control channel on cellular or use a private network, and all of those are technically, you know, feasible. Meanwhile, in Europe, AMI deployment... are largely being powered by LoRaWAN technologies, as seen in Veolia's recent commitment to roll out 3 million LoRaWAN connected meters in France by 2029. For us, when we are doing IMI for smart water metering, we are believing that LoRaWAN is the best technology for us. But for some other sensors, water quality, where the battery life, we don't need 15 years, but we need to send more data. in order to provide more services. And in this case, we are believing that 5G or GSM, 4G, is better than LoRaWAN for that. LoRa is not available in many parts of rural America. Instead, many utilities run off LTE technology, but that could soon change, according to Bruce Chatterley, the CEO of Senet. All of a sudden, a couple of years from now, you're gonna see the United States blanketed with a public LoRaWAN coverage. Senet has been building LoRa network. in the US since 2014. The industry has moved over the last couple of years from what I would call a developer-focused, device-focused, project-focused industry to now a solutions-focused industry where people are deploying mission-critical applications at scale. So to give you an example, we have a market in California where the utility wanted to move to AMI. And so they selected LoRaWAN and one of our partners, Neptune, as a meter manufacturer, and we went and deployed that network. And within 60 to 90 days, we had almost 30 ,000 homes covered and connected to our network. That network is now available for any use case that the city or anyone else would want to use that for. And that kind of expansion of AMI and other smart... city applications underscores another important trend within the smart water market, a consolidation. You might recall we discussed a topic in our last story concerning the water distribution network. Increasingly, we're seeing established metering players move into leak detection and pipeline monitoring along with data management and analytics. It all comes as AMI endpoint shipments in the European and North American water sectors are expected to reach over 14 million units in 2020. In 2019, that number was just over 6 million. For more coverage on AMI and the use of IoT by utilities, be sure to stick with Current Insights. And if you have a question or another story pitch, be sure to hit the link below.