LITTLE GUYS GET SMARTER FASTER

Surprising Deployment Developments
Peter Fox-Penner, August 2011 (IEEE Smart Grid)

"…It's probably generally assumed…that big investor-owned and public utilities would be first to adopt smart grid technologies. Surely, then, it’s a surprise to some that rural electric cooperatives and a few municipal utilities have turned out to be among the earliest smart meter adopters…

"In an industry where attention is often focused almost exclusively on investor-owned utilities and their flashy, large scale smart grid rollouts, one might think a smaller customer base and much smaller budgets would hold public power back. Instead, cooperatives are taking advantage of their smaller scale to deploy smart meters in a more personal and customer-focused manner emphasizing consumer education…"

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"Public power utilities are not only leading the way in adopting smart grid technologies, but are also rapidly becoming innovators. Cooperatives have taken steps to develop new modes of interoperability and 30 percent of them are now integrating their smart meter systems with other data systems, such as outage management systems and customer information systems…

"Cooperatives currently lead smart meter deployment with 25 percent penetration of their customers' homes—three times higher than the average across all utilities…Half of all cooperatives offer their customers advanced metering infrastructure or advanced metering reading; together they generate 25 percent of U.S. residential peak load reductions, even though they only account for 10 percent of electricity sales…"