The City of Flora in the US state of Illinois has announced its partnership with technology firm OATI to improve the operations of grid and customer services by deploying advanced metering infrastructure.
Upgrading its meters with advanced meters is helping the city to leverage real-time consumer energy usage and grid operations data to create a robust grid network that is scalable, dependable and efficient.
Moreover, the smart meters will help eliminate inaccurate energy billing at the same time, improving the utility’s revenue collection and reducing non-technical expenses incurred due to energy theft and inaccurate billing.
OATI’s AMIoT advanced metering infrastructure is being used to provide the city with situational awareness regarding the operations of the grid, with remote disconnect and reconnect capabilities, outage alerting, and other critical information.
The AMI has been in operation since October 2020 and continues to be expanded with an additional 2,700 advanced electric meters set to be deployed.
The city has set a plan to complete rollout of its smart meters programme by summer 2021.
Brandon Helm, lineman and AMI project manager for the City of Flora, said: “It has been great having real time data available while in the field, and using the remote disconnect functionality has increased efficiency by reducing the number of required trips in the field.”
In addition to the smart meters, OATI is providing the City with a LORAWAN network for smart meter data telemetry. The network can be expanded to other LoRa devices for demand response, smart city, and other use cases, at a lower cost.
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More and more utilities are deploying smart meters to optimise grid operations.
US utility Con Edison has announced a smart meter milestone with Itron following the installation of some 4 million smart gas modules and electricity meters for consumers in New York. Some 25,000 methane detectors developed by Itron have also been deployed by the utility, a development that has led to the detection and mitigation of over 300 valid gas events.
The demand for smart meters continues to grow as utilities seek to optimise smart grid benefits.
Annual revenue for advanced metering infrastructure is expected to hit $13.8 billion by 2027, according to a new report released by Research and Markets.
The research firm expects the global market for advanced metering infrastructure to record a 9.5% compound annual growth rate between 2020 and 2027.
In 2020, the market raised $7.3 billion in revenue, owing to anticipated deployments in the US, China, Europe, and as well as in Asia and North America.
The US market is estimated to have generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2020.
In China, the market is expected to expand by 11.0% to generate $5.3 billion per annum by 2027.
Canada, Japan and Europe are each forecast to grow at 7.1%, 6.3% and 7.3% respectively.
The smart electricity meters segment is expected to expand by 9.7% over the next seven years with USA, Japan, China, and Europe driving the anticipated growth. The segment generated $3.1 billion in revenue in 2020 and is expected to hit $5.8 billion per annum by 2027.