At the 2021 North Carolina Electric Meter School, Tom Lawton gave the Opening Keynote on smart meters and the increasingly important role the meter is playing in the smart grid.

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10/02/2012 Slide 1
New Uses for Electric
Meters
as We Continue to Leverage AMI Technology
Prepared by Tom Lawton, TESCO
The Eastern Specialty Company
For North Carolina Electric Meter School
Opening Keynote
Monday, June 14, 2021 at 9:45 a.m.

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Smart Meters & Smart Grids
• AMI has brought us a Smart Meter.
• Why do we care? Because a smart meter is the heart of a Smart Grid.
• This morning we will give two presentations, the first about the Smart Meter
and how the role of the meter continues to evolve and how this evolution is
helping to change the grid and is making the smart grid a reality. The
second will discuss the history and the potential of the smart grid.
• Between the two, we hope to paint a picture of
• The constantly evolving role of the smart meter
• Where we are with the smart grid
• Where we think each may lead

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The Electric Meter as We Knew It
• Initially designed to simply measure energy use
• Minimal changes for over 100 years. Most of these
“changes” were just variations on a theme …

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Changes to Electric Meters
Time of use rates – measure not only the usage but
when the usage occurred. Often a second meter was
employed.
Demand rates – measure peak usage during a 15- or
30-minute interval. These demand intervals for many
decades had to be manually reset.
AMR – this simply automated the reading of the meter.

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AMI Changing the Game
• Meters took on significantly more functionality than just
measuring energy usage.
• Meters now:
• Can automatically disconnect or reconnect a customer’s
service
• Can sense dangerous conditions at the meter site like a
fire
• Can sense if they are being tampered with
• Can send out a “last gasp” communication that their
service has been interrupted
• And similarly report in when service is restored, and
they are back online. Better and more accurate
information sharing and customer service during
outage conditions.

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AMI Changing the Game
And what else have our new AMI meters done for their next trick?
• Improved Load Forecasting
• Enhanced Voltage and Reactive Power Management
• Operations and Maintenance Cost Savings
• Improved Customer Service and Reduced Operational Costs
• Automated Billing and Remote Meter Reading, Connection, and
Disconnection
• More Accurate Outage Location to Support Rapid Restoration
• Enhanced Revenues and Reduced Bad Debt Write-Offs
• Price Responsive Demand Response
• Enhanced Revenue Collection
• Revenue Assurance
• Power Quality
The list of features continues to grow as we recognize more and more ways to
leverage the power of our AMI systems and meters.

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Early uses for Smart Meters in this
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
Not an easy or an obvious evolution. Early features;
• Disconnect switches
• Tampering
• Outage notification and location
• Voltage and Power Quality information

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Did anyone want these features in every
meter? Would we use them?
But even as AMI rolled out we wondered how effective some
these features would be.
• Would there be widespread adoption?
• Would Utilities make and be convinced by a business case to
put things like a disconnect switch in every meter recognizing
that meter disconnects were typically performed on only a
small percentage of customers?
• Would these savings alone justify the cost?
• Would the “fringe benefits” prove to be worthwhile and
actionable by the rest of the Distribution operation?

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Metering Takes Center Stage
• As AMI has been implemented across the U.S. and Canada
utility after utility proved to themselves how successful AMI
has been in addressing each of these concerns.
• These “new” features like disconnect switches are now
ubiquitous and nearly every AMI meter has them.
• Why – because the operational cost savings far exceeded
expectations while at the same time proving to be a better,
quicker and safer way to service the customer.
• Less expensive and better? Always a good combination.
• And even the limited data coming back in the early days of
AMI proved actionable and highly beneficial to the rest of the
Distribution operation

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A Star is Born
• Information is King and Metering is now supplying more and
more real time data to the Distribution Operations at every
utility which has implemented AMI.
• This has turned Metering into the new “Star” of the
Distribution world. The meter is now looked to as a source of
information and is now also being looked at to provide more
and more information and more and more solutions.

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The New Reality
• Trucks roll both inside and outside of metering as a result of
the information being provided through the Smart Meters and
the Advanced Metering Infrastructure.
• We are now beginning to start with the meter as a potential
source to solve a range of new distribution problems that
require new solutions.
• Applications for metering have grown, and the new ways we
might use electric meters are exploding.

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Back to the Future and into the
Future
• AMI is enabling old technologies to make a come back and
providing the ability for technologies that have been talked
about for some time to be more effectively implemented.
• Pre-paid metering
• Inexpensive metering for smaller, newer applications
that can piggyback onto an AMI network as a
communication network
• Safety features – Hot Sockets and high temperatures
• Security – new ways to detect tampering and energy theft
• And perhaps the best feature – the promise of increased
Functionality through Firmware upgrades

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New Meter Usage with AMI
• Time to begin a new thought process on meter usage and
how they can solve problems out in the field:
• Threats of forest fires
• Implementing more renewables
• Obtaining data for advanced analytics
• Implementing new technology at the retail-end of the
distribution system

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Moving Outside-the-Box
• Slightly out-of-the-box solutions using meters
• Back-Up Power:
• “Burn Season”
• Rolling blackouts
• Non-automated back-up generators
• Solution: AMI back-up power meter
• Uses an integrated adapter to add more features into a
standard meter.

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And Continuing that thought….
• This type of thinking then let’s other’s take these ideas to the
next level;
• Adapt the same technology for Back-up power in the “Burn
season” to allow things like Power Walls coupled with either
electric cars or renewable, on site power generation to also be
automatically switched back and forth with grid power. DER
(Distributed Energy Resource – any resource on the
distribution system that produces electricity and is not part of
the Bulk Electric System) being readily implemented - through
the meter.

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Continuing Outside-the-Box
• “On the drawing board” or actively being worked on and tested
• Each meter manufacturer has more and more features where some will
never see the light of day but many more will
• Disaggregation
• Takes the entire energy signal of an entire building as captured by the
meter and separates this into appliance or equipment specific data. Not
a perfect science but is being improved every day as the algorithms that
are used are improved – by constantly evaluating more and more AMI
data.
• Why is this interesting?
• Quick identification of malfunctions and maintenance needs;
understanding energy hogs and a need for newer technology;
better information for the utility to provide better targeted rates and
for consumers to adopt them. Energy savings that many claim can
easily reach into the double digits.
• Many utilities are already working with meter manufacturers to
include this feature as part of their next AMI requirements and
some may have already done so.

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Further Outside-the-Box
• Form factor is no longer necessary applicable for new and necessary
metering applications
• Streetlights
• More LED streetlights requiring less maintenance
• Utilities seem to be programming “banks” of lights and not individual
streetlights
• At some point in our future, every light will need to be metered
• Outage and maintenance requirements are already being reported
by streetlight metering
• 5G is changing the world
• Goal is to provide coverage “everywhere”
• More new technologies up the pole
• Air pollution monitors, gunshot monitors, security cameras,
temperature and humidity monitors, and the list grows as quickly as
people come up with more needs for “up the pole”
technologies..

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New Sand Boxes to play in
• EVSE
• Car charging stations selling electricity directly to consumer
• Every manufacturer of car chargers are working on installing
and having approved revenue grade metering as certified by
the Bureau of Weights and Measures.
• Metering people are not involved
• An opportunity for electric utilities to become the supplier
of the public car chargers in their service territories

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Risks
• Operations groups that know little to nothing about metering are starting to
get involved in metering
• Risks of groups re-inventing the wheel
• Competing standards
• Incomplete standards
• Contradictory standards
• We saw this in the first draft of UL 2735 when UL initially included some
provisions that contradicted ANSI C12 which is the standard we run our
meter service departments by and which most Utility Commissions measure
us against.

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Getting Involved
• Metering personnel need to actively engage with streetlight standards
groups, EVSE standards groups, communication vendor standards groups
and as many other standards groups as we can find who are becoming
interested in including an electric metering in their equipment because this
is what is required to allow for widespread adoption of whatever new
technology they are working on.

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Moving from the Smart Meter to the
Smart Grid
• This shift to a meter centric universe should have been obvious from the
start of AMI, but the meter was so often the forgotten element of the
distribution system. Not only was the grid “dumb”, the meter was “dumb”.
The meter could not receive information and the meter could not speak.
• We knew everything that is going on at the generating station and at the sub
stations. We knew about the voltages, the power quality, the amount of
energy we were generating and moving.
• We had no feedback from the end of the system. The system was “open
loop” and “dumb”.

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Closing the Loop
• At the end of the distribution system is the meter. We have always known
how much energy we deliver to every customer. However, this was always
an open loop system with no feedback coming from the meter. Now we
have real time feedback coming from the meter.
• Given this capability, one of the first new features built into AMI meters was
feedback on the voltage at the end point. Now we can tell where there are voltage
drops, where we may have tampering, where we may have distribution
transformers on their way out. A tremendous amount of data that we have been
using to make our distribution systems more robust.
• We have learned about power quality and issues affecting individual customers
and larger groups of customers.
• We can see when a group of customers adopts solar or install electric vehicle
chargers
• We can monitor for safety issues at the end point
• We can properly size distribution transformers when they need to be replaced
• We can spot loose connections and undersized conductors on our lines

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A Shift in Thinking
• With all of these game changing advances we should have started to shift
our thinking regarding the meter.
• And this shift is finally starting.
• When we are faced with a new issue that needs a new solution – anything
from safety to new revenue streams to better customer service we should
and are using the meter as a starting point. How can we use the meter to
solve this? A new feature? Integrate a new technology?.

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Moving from the Smart Meter to the
Smart Grid
• The meter is ideally situated in the distribution system. With two-way
communication enabled at every metering end point we now know what is
happening every step of the way from the generating station or inter-tie
point to the sub station to the end user. And we can respond to provide
better service, better power, respond to outages, respond to theft, respond
to new trends in usage, respond to new users.
• Starting with the meter we have now begun to make the smart grid a reality.
And this is only the beginning – for both the meter and the grid.

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Questions and Discussion
Tom Lawton
President
tom.lawton@tescometering.com
TESCO – The Eastern Specialty Company
Bristol, PA
215-228-0500
This presentation can also be found under Meter Conferences and
Schools on the TESCO website: www.tescometering.com
ISO 9001:2015 Certified Quality Company
ISO 17025:2017 Accredited Laboratory