Tony Anderson – Smart Grid/Meter

Video Transcript:

The smart grid, I guess I get a little frustrated with that term because I think it’s what we should be doing on the grid and what we are trying to do locally started five years ago when we spent six million dollars and we automated all the meters on our system. We have thirty three thousand meters we serve; we put in a new electronic meter on each account that allows us to read that meter from the office. You can call that smart meters you can call that AMI, which is automated metering infrastructure or AMR, which is, automated meter reading. But these smart meter, the new electronic meter give us the ability to read them anytime we want. If a storm blows through the area we can read all our meters and see which one’s are responding and which one’s are not to determine where the outages are. On Friday’s we read them all and if we have any issues with seasonal cabins we get those issues resolved before somebody comes up from downstate and discovers they don’t have power. So it’s helped us become more efficient and it’s what we should be doing to keep the lights on better then we have in the past. We started that five years ago before the word smart meter and smart grid became popular. It’s just a commitment we made to serve our embers better. Now we have since taken it into our substations where we have electronic regulations and controls in the substations that allow us to read what’s going on in that substation, what is the voltage, have the breakers tripped in the substation? We can now do that in the office, which helps us respond to big outages quicker and on a greater scale. In the years to come we will move that technology down line to the breakers on different sections that are tied into those substations so we can sectionalize better, restore areas of outages better and just know what the voltages is on our system at all times. As people get more and more technology and electronics in their house voltage is very important and the better we can control that voltage, watch that voltage from the office the smarter people think we are but again it’s something we should be doing. It’s about customer service so I don’t think the smart grid is anything new and different it’s just stuff that’s available that we should be doing that we have been doing for several years and it’s just getting a lot of press and media now. It’s just what we do everyday.