Could Smart Meters Help Accelerate Outage Recovery in New Jersey?
In August 2020, Tropical Storm Isaias rocked the state of New Jersey, causing over 1.4 million residents to lose power and hundreds of thousands to lose cable and internet services. This has prompted renewed discussions around the benefits of smart meters, AKA advanced metering infrastructure (AMI).
What Smart Meters Can and Cannot Do
One of the main benefits of AMI infrastructure is that it can instantly and automatically notify electric utilities of a power outage. They can also help utility customers conserve energy and improve energy efficiency.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether or not smart meters can actually increase the speed of restorations. But the good news is that the answer should become clearer in the near future.
The state’s smallest electric utility – Rockland Electric – is currently running a pilot involving the installation of 74,000 smart meters. The NJ Board of Public Utilities (BPU) will be studying the results of this pilot to determine whether or not it makes sense to expand AMI deployments statewide. Concurrently, the BPU has requested that every electric utility in the state submit a plan for a smart meter deployment.
The main problem with expanding AMI statewide is the high cost of doing so. Specifically, it would cost “hundreds of millions of dollars” so the juice had better be worth the squeeze.
From my perspective, although smart meters have numerous benefits, I’m struggling to see how their deployment will move the needle in terms of increasing the speed of restoration activity. With or without a robust AMI infrastructure, there will still be outages, and utility crews will still need to reconnect downed lines. Plus, the NJ grid has already been upgraded following Superstorm Sandy, so it’s unclear how much additional benefit could be gleaned with smart meters.
That said, I believe smart meters will likely speed up the damage assessment process, so there might be something here. We won’t know the final verdict for quite some time, especially since public hearings will be scheduled to debate the pros and cons, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.
