Kenny Mercado, division senior vice president, Advanced Metering System Deployment, said: “Smart meter functionality is an important step in providing consumers with the insight and tools to monitor their usage so that they can make smart energy decisions.”
Smart meters would be read remotely virtually eliminating the need to go house to house. The smart meter functionality also enables remote connection and disconnection of electric service, that would reduce the time it takes to process service orders for most homes and some small businesses. The new smart meter functionality, that increases consumer awareness of their energy usage, would create Home Area Networks to monitor electric usage with in-home devices and remotely control Zigbee-enabled appliances and thermostats.
Retail Electric Providers (REPs), with this functionality, can also view their customers’ historical 15-minute interval usage over an interim CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric Web portal and next year a portal will be available to consumers as well. This will help consumers monitor the effects of thermostat adjustments or changes in energy use. Using less energy can save consumers money, which means less power may need to be produced, benefiting the environment.
The company’s five-year smart meter deployment commenced in March 2009, and by the end of 2009, 145,000 smart meters would be installed along with the required communications infrastructure and computing systems. Approximately 2.4 million meters are expected to be installed system-wide by the end of the project, which is expected to be completed in 2014.
