Upon completion of this phase, DME will roll out AMI meters in homes and businesses throughout Denton. The entire project is expected to take five to seven years, deploy about 45,000 smart meters, and phase out the need to manually read meters.
Denton is home to about 45,000 college students, so we have a great deal of residential turn-over, according to Kyle Tunnell, Meter Planner and Coordinator at DME. Today we have to roll a truck every time there is an ownership change to an account, which is costly and inefficient. When our smart meters are up and running, we will have the capability to simply log in to a residential or commercial account and make whatever changes are required.
By installing smart meters, DME will also have a greater understanding of how energy is consumed by Denton residents. Instead of monthly meter readings, the new meters collect usage data electronically in intervals selected by DME. The most common intervals are usually every fifteen or sixty minutes. This level of transparency into its data will permit DME to speed up their response to outages and consumer requests to service connections and disconnect service, as well as a greater understanding of the load on transformers, substations and feeders.
We consider this implementation the first step in providing our customers with the right tools and information to make smart energy decisions, added Tunnell. Everyone wants to do something about energy savings, and with Trilliant’s help we have the tools to make a real difference.
Denton is a great example of how Trilliant uses Smart Grid technology to solve real business problems, said Eric Miller, chief solutions officer of Trilliant. DME will be able to provide more detail and better information about how their customers are using energy, as well as insights into how to better manage that usage throughout the Denton power grid.
Trilliant is a US based provider of intelligent network solutions and software to utilities for advanced metering, demand response, and Smart Grid management.
