Timely, frequent meter data is increasingly essential to utilities, whether they’re focusing on new rate design, decarbonization, equity, resiliency, or myriad other emerging challenges. To get that data, utilities have successfully deployed millions of advanced meters, with more to come as the current generation reaches its end of life. But while data is essential, the costs of meter infrastructure are often borne by customers through rate increases. Those costs can be substantial: advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployments frequently rise to hundreds of millions of dollars per utility, and they are rapidly increasing. In fact, one utility recently estimated that the cost of new AMI in its territory has increased by roughly 25% over just the last three years. To make sure that utilities can continue to get the data they need without overburdening customers with rising rates, it’s vital to improve the cost-effectiveness of new metering investments.
One promising approach is AMx, in which the “x” is a stand-in for a wide range of different meter types. AMx is a pragmatic framework for meter infrastructure investments and management that uses modern meter reading technology to deliver true meter interoperability, reduce reliance on proprietary AMI communication networks, get more frequent data from existing AMI and AMR meters, and better leverage converged infrastructure (such as existing broadband) to get more out of current metering technologies and support a best-of-breed data ecosystem. An AMx framework can build additional flexibility and resiliency into new AMI deployments while improving cost-effectiveness, limiting rate impacts, and allowing system- and customer-facing benefits to be realized much more quickly than would otherwise be the case.
Perhaps the largest immediate area where AMx can help is in enabling mixed-meter portfolios with more agile, strategic, and staggered meter replacements. In the current metering framework, utilities typically must install a brand-new communication network in order to upgrade meters, so there’s a strong incentive to maximize the capabilities of every single meter across a full territory and to stick with a particular vendor’s technology ecosystem. But in a more interoperable AMx framework, not every customer needs to have the most advanced, expensive—and potentially shortest-lived—meter. Even technologies as simple and low-cost as AMR drive-by meters can be remotely read much more frequently (e.g. as often as every 30 seconds) to support use cases like outage management, time-of-use rate structures, customer reporting and engagement, or grid-edge visibility. The most advanced meters can then be relegated to the places they make the most sense, such as where particular customers want extremely detailed insights into energy use (e.g. during or after a home energy audit), or when a limited number of meters can be strategically scattered across a distribution network to enable conservation voltage reduction or volt/VAR optimization. AMx also opens the door to a much wider array of potential meter vendors that utilities can choose from, encouraging increased competition that can help keep costs low and unlock exciting new meter functionality as utility needs evolve.
AMx-enabled mixed-meter portfolios also directly address a widespread ongoing challenge: how to reliably quantify both the customer- and utility-facing benefits of new meter infrastructure before doing widespread deployments of the technology (particularly since new potential use cases for meter data are continually emerging). That’s true whether a utility is installing AMI for the first time or considering a move from so-called AMI 1.0 to AMI 2.0 to get new features and capabilities. The reason benefits are typically so hard to evaluate is that, under current metering infrastructure paradigms, utilities generally can’t easily deploy new meters to test them out with customers unless they also deploy fully redundant communications networks or buy expensive additional hardware to try to connect the meter with an existing AMI network (something that may limit the benefits of the new hardware if it restricts data transfer speeds). In an AMx framework, though, it’s simple to deploy new meters for a small pilot and directly evaluate the benefits before deciding whether to invest in a larger scaled rollout.
AMx is a new kind of thinking that allows utilities to be much more dynamic and agile in their infrastructure planning, to have more flexibility to make smart choices that help keep rates low, to easily test new use cases, and to spread out costs over time while more quickly realizing benefits for both customers and utilities alike. In an environment where it’s becoming more challenging to balance the growing need for higher-resolution data with the desire to maintain affordability, AMx is a compelling new tool in utilities’ toolkits that shouldn’t be overlooked.
