Itron, Inc.

From the lights twinkling in the tallest skyscrapers to the lamps illuminating small town America, it is almost impossible to fathom any community today functioning without electric power. Our dependence on electricity has made its effective management and delivery critical. The economic climate, however, has made this an increasingly difficult task for utilities to accomplish. Increases in wholesale natural gas prices over the past few years have resulted in higher costs for electricity generation and hence higher electricity prices. Utilities are faced with the challenge of ensuring adequate supply while at the same time keeping rates low for their customers.

Recent technological advances in the electricity metering market have the potential to make this an easier endeavor by revolutionizing the way utility companies operate. As the largest U.S. supplier of electricity meters, Itron, Inc. is leading this charge. In 1998, Itron introduced the Centron® meter, which represented the first major advance in more than a century in residential metering. A departure from the traditional electromechanical meter, this new electronic-based, or solidstate meter, is remarkable because it provides a platform for automatic meter reading (AMR). AMR systems are the future of energy management as they allow meters to be read remotely.

The ability to assess residential electricity usage remotely is quite powerful. Benefits include reduced metering costs, outage detection, and improved billing accuracy, which all add up to better customer service. Perhaps most importantly, these products allow utility companies to gain more insight into electricity usage patterns and to manage demand more efficiently across the grid. Because customer electricity use patterns differ by time of day, utilities value tools that help them in shifting the electricity “load” to non-peak periods. This reduces the need to build additional power plants solely to meet peak demands.

Itron combines its meters and data collection products with creative software solutions that enable the utility to identify these peak load periods and then focus on specific operational areas that can be modified to smooth out the loads. Through repetition, a utility is able to better predict demand and manage the distribution of electricity, thus lowering operating costs through optimization and “inventory” management initiatives.

Currently, about 25 percent of the 275 million meters in the United States are read with AMR technology. As the population grows and energy demands soar, effective energy management is indispensable. Itron’s innovative products are likely to be an integral part of the mix.

—H. Harris