Exploring One of US’ Latest Electric Smart Meter Deployments

The US electric utility industry has proven great maturity when it comes to smart solutions. With 119 million advanced metering installations already deployed, around 70% of meters in the country are now smart. Xcel Energy, a US utility present in eight states, launched a few years ago their Advanced Grid initiative for their electricity services. The $1.7 billion scheme included projects to modernize the grid with advanced distribution management systems or smart meters among other technologies. They started deploying smart meters in Colorado in 2021, and by the end of 2023, around 1 million had already been installed in the Centennial State. But the hope is that we can deploy across all of the eight states that we operate in by 2025, that will bring the total number of meters slightly shy, electric only again, slightly less than 4 million endpoints. We have about 3.9 million electric endpoints in all of those eight states. Advanced metering Infrastructures, or AMIs include meters that measure and record electricity use and have a built-in two-way communications system that can record and transmit instantaneous data, providing information to both the utility and the customer at least once a day. Xcel Energy is installing Itron’s Riva meters coupled to Itron’s Gen 5 Mesh network. Data is collected every 15 minutes, and the information is sent every 4 hours, unless there’s a critical event, like a power outage, in which case, it’s sent in real-time. The mesh gateways use backbone LTE cellular connectivity to connect field devices to the Meter Data Management System that manages and analyzes huge amounts of raw data, which is then fed into various utility applications including billing and revenue management systems. So the field communication between the devices is mesh, but then from the field devices back into the Xcel network infrastructure, we actually have a cellular backhaul. We use a public backhaul today. The company is looking at an initiative potentially to go to a private LTE at some point in the future. That's not yet been resolved. The project is set to help the company achieve its sustainability and efficiency goals. Xcel Energy, which invests in renewable energy, pledged that by 2035 they’d reduce carbon emissions by 80%, and by 2050, they’d be carbon neutral. The idea behind the Advanced Grid initiative is to help them achieve that objective, but also, to improve and modernize its network to offer a more efficient service thanks to understanding demand. Because the grid that we have today was based off of the old paradigm where you had the generation located in a particular place. You generate, you transmit to the load centers, and power flow was only in one direction. But as we've had distributed energy resources and a plethora of other systems that are being deployed on the distribution grid, there's really a need for us to modernize our grid. And so part of the smart meter deployments, I think about the smart meters as basically having sensors out on our distribution system. It's to allow us to have visibility into the grid more than ever. So that we are able to then ensure that as we look to deploy more of this renewable resources, we have our eyes on how the actually the grid is operating. What are the conditions? How can we best position and leverage that the infrastructure that we have? The company has already seen the benefits of installing smart meters, with more efficient billing or the ability to remotely connect and disconnect the supply, and they’ve been able to integrate AMI data into outage management systems to identify and respond to outages quickly without relying on customers. This also serves as a return on investment, as being able to see and manage the network remotely has led to fewer road trips. I think of smart meters as just foundational elements for us to modernize the grid. We are going to continue to build upon the infrastructure as we develop and come up with new use cases. Those are just a few, but there's a lot more that we're able to identify today. We have voltage issues in the field. These smart meters are also recording voltage information. So we have high or minimum voltage conditions out on the grid. We're pulling that information back, our distribution engineers are able to leverage that information to identify where we might have problems, either with the service or you might have an issue with transformers by leveraging and continue to build our capacity to leverage that data to better operate and provide our customers with reliable power. The utility is late to the smart meter party in the USA, as many other utilities already sensorised their networks years ago. Smart meters serve as a base because of the communications infrastructure that is deployed to connect them, which can be used for many smart projects. Actually, the strategy that we took at Xcel before we even decided to deploy smart meters, we actually wanted to deploy a network first that would serve multiple applications. Not only for smart meters, but we wanted a network solution that would serve, smart metering, will serve gas, will serve distribution automation and a bunch of other applications that the company would want to deploy as part of the Smart Grid initiative. We've got information technology, interfaces or integrations that we've built that makes these smart meter data available so that it can be used for a variety of use cases. Grid modernization is key for projects in EV charging, as the utilities will need to understand demand to adjust supply. Smart streetlights are also a key application, since in the US, most streetlights are owned by utilities. AMIs provide the communications infrastructure necessary for the deployment of smart city and digitalization solutions and services for cities making energy utilities like Xcel Energy key smart city enablers in the US. However, we’ve spoken to cities that struggled to reach agreements with their local utilities, so both sides will have to work on this issue together to have an efficient smart city infrastructure that benefits all.