By Michael Barrett
For Texas State students paying utility bills to the City of San Marcos, including those that live in apartments owned by the university, a recent citywide switch of electric meters for their buildings will mean an increase in options regarding how they manage their energy consumption in the future.
The city's implementation of Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) technology will involve new, “smart” meters that will send frequent updates on usage to the city utility office using radio transmitters.
“There are several advantages: more frequent meter reads for the city and for the customer to look at consumption, so customers can try to adjust their consumption patterns to adjust their bills,” Angela Riley, Metering Supervisor for the City of San Marcos, said.
She said the city now has less than one hundred electric meters left to switch out, and that the installation of the water meters should be completed by around June of next year.
The smart water meters will offer the city and its customers similar advantages to the electric ones, including the city's ability to detect water leaks, even before the customer calls the utility office.
“The city has quicker notification when we have outages on the electric side, conservation reporting on the water side,” Riley said.
According to the City of San Marcos Web site, other advantages of the new meters include quicker connects and disconnects, greater personnel safety, and fewer personnel on the street, meaning fewer vehicles and less pollution.
Benefits of the system that are on the way will include the city’s ability to keep better track of customer demand and system loads, as well as the capability for the city to offer different rates corresponding to different times of the day, thereby encouraging customers to use appliances at off-peak times instead of when there is heavy demand on the grid.
According to the city’s Web site, the project will have paid for itself after 5 to 7 years, thanks to “labor savings, reduced water and electric line loss and increased operational efficiencies.”
The city won Utility Automation and Engineering T&D Magazine’s “AMI Project of the Year” award at a national conference in San Diego in February, according to the city’s Web site.
A city press release covering the award quotes City Manager Rick Menchaca as saying, “Winning this award reaffirms our belief that AMI and smart meters are a very good investment for the citizens of San Marcos.”
Riley, alluding to what has so far been a successful program, said that the process of installing the meters to date has been relatively smooth: “Minor problems, but nothing major.”
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