The Kauai Island Utility Cooperative is nearly halfway through its effort to install smart meters islandwide, and the utility has already begun to cut costs by reading members’ meters remotely, company officials said Monday.
KIUC engineers have installed the high-tech meters at 12,000 of 33,000 homes and businesses, said Michael Yamane, chief of operations. The utility is on track to have the rest of the meters installed by the first quarter of next year.
Meter readers no longer have to go to sites where smart meters have been installed, resulting in reduced operatings costs for the utility, said Yamane, who was in Honolulu for the Asia Pacific Clean Energy Summit at the Hawai‘i Convention Center.
The smart meters wirelessly transmit real-time energy usage to the utility. The system also allows KIUC to connect and disconnect meters remotely, detect power outages at households and provide information on electricity flows that allow the utility to accommodate more renewable energy in its grid.
There has been some opposition to the program from utility members, some of whom have invasion-of-privacy concerns. KIUC’s board of directors in June voted to allow members for the time being to defer installation if they oppose the program. However, Yamane said response from KIUC members generally has been positive.
One feature that some members have welcomed is an in-home display that shows real-time energy consumption. The display can be set with a color-coded system that changes from green to amber to red as energy use increases. The display can also be calibrated to show the cost of the energy being used at current rates. KIUC officials are hoping the displays will lead to reducing energy consumption, Yamane said.
"When iT hits red and you are using three times your normal usage, it catches your eye," he said.
The smart-meter program cost the utility $11 million, half of which is being paid for by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Information is tranmitted wirelessly from customers back to KIUC headquarters via a network of "advanced metering infrastructure" collectors and routers mounted on utility poles and street lights.
The information is fed into a computer program that creates a detailed map of Kauai used by engineers at the KIUC command center. Engineers can click on the map to see real-time energy use at all levels of the grid, down to individual customers.
