There’s been a lot of talk about the Jefferson County Utility District’s new meters plans, and as the very first hired electrical employee of the PUD, former operations manager and current acting manager, I wanted to explain what we have proposed to do to upgrade and replace the current meter system, and why.

The current electrical metering system was failing when we inherited it from Puget Sound Energy (PSE) in 2013.

In fact, we have been actively talking about replacing it since 2013. Why is it failing? The technical term we have been using to explain it is “hodgepodge.” We have meters ranging in age from a year old to over 40 years old, made by different companies, some analog (the mechanical spinning wheel), some digital, some that are read by our meter readers, some that are read by meter readers employed by a contractor that came with our PSE purchase, and some read by another contractor that the previous contractor contracts with.

Make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.

The majority of the meters are over 30 years old, and they are those analog mechanical type of meters. The folks who have recently opposed our project say that if these old aluminum wheel mechanical meters are still in use after 30 or even 60 years, we shouldn’t replace them with new digital meters made of plastic and circuit boards.

While the old analog meter wheels may spin for 30 years, they don’t spin true. Like anything else, they wear down and they wear out and they stop working like they are supposed to. Spin for 30 or more years? Yes. Work for 30 or more years? No.

48 TIMES BETTER

And what we have now is a situation in which 67 percent of the meters in this county are not working properly, with 450 or more outright failing, on average, every year, and up to 60 a week failing during storms. We can replace those individual meters as they fail, and we have, but unless we address the entire system, and soon, we are spending a lot of time and energy and money putting band-aids on a broken leg and contributing further to that hodgepodge system we hoped to improve.

I started working as a lineman back in Idaho when I was 18. I have worked all over the western U.S. fixing lines, replacing transformers and managing meter systems. I have worked with analog meters, and I have helped communities transition to the new “two-way” digital meters proposed.

I can tell you without a doubt that the system the PUD presented to the public on Oct. 30, and at the previous public board meetings over the past year and a half, is at a minimum 48 times better than the current system, and in my personal opinion, a fair sight more of an improvement than that.

Why 48 times better?

The current meters, whether digital and a year old and read by us, or 40-plus years old and read by a contractor, have all been outfitted to send out a radio frequency signal every five minutes with the customer’s meter number and usage data.

Now, for many of the folks who oppose our proposed meter replacement project, two of the main concerns have been radiation exposure from radio frequency (or RF, similar to a cell phone) signal emissions and information theft or hacking. The current meters are not programmable. The new ones would be, reducing transmissions to every four hours instead of every five minutes.

The current system has been in place for over 15 years. What we are proposing with our new meters is not the radical departure that some folks are claiming. What we are proposing is instead a systemwide upgrade. We want to do it better than before, and better than now.

SAFER THAN OLD ONES

As a lifelong electric utility worker, safety is about as important a thing to me as there could be. And I can say without a doubt that the new meters the PUD has proposed to install will be safer for the public and the PUD than the ones that are currently installed. Not only do they emit less RF, and less frequently, the new meters tell us instantly if there is an outage and where it’s at.

We don’t have to wait for someone to call it in; the meters can be shut off remotely and instantly in a house fire (currently the fire department calls us, and we have to send a truck and crew out to shut off power); and during what today would be an outage, the new meters can be programmed to keep power on at reduced levels as available from a substation that, in a storm incident, might not be able to deliver at full load.

None of these benefits are available from our current meters and would be absolutely impossible to deliver if, as some have requested, we were to go back to an all-analog system.

SMART, OR ADVANCED

I haven’t brought the “smart” word up until now and there’s a reason for that, because in my world, that’s not a very well-defined term. The meters in use now could just as easily be called smart meters as the new ones could.

What I have recommended the PUD purchase and install are called AMIs, or advanced metering instruments or advanced meters. The way that they are advanced past our current meters is that instead of just sending a signal out, they can also receive signals, allowing for the remote shutoff as explained above. They are also programmable, also mentioned above. They also track and report customer usage information by the day and even the hour, instead of the monthly reporting that today’s meters provide. What’s the advance there?

Well, the only way that I personally have ever found to truly reduce consumption is to track as much of your usage data as you can – on the individual and the countywide level. We conserve power best by knowing when and how power is being consumed. The smart or advanced meters we have proposed to install won’t be tracking or reporting different information than they are now, just more of it; power usage by the hour instead of by the month.

Well, there is one fundamental difference. And it’s pretty smart, in my opinion, but not so very technologically advanced, comparatively.

Remember how I said the current meters send out a signal every five minutes, and how we use contractors (as well as some our own staff) to read meters? Well, the way they currently read the meters is by driving trucks, with receivers built on top, thousands of miles a month all over Jefferson County to pick up those signals. With the new system, the signal gets sent to the cloud and back to the PUD.

No trucks, no driving, no $300,000 per year contract to have meters read by others. I have plenty of other tasks for our current meter techs to do besides drive. I think I can use their time, and our dollars, in much smarter and greener ways than we currently do.

PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC

When PSE retrofitted the old analog meters to make them a kind of smart meter, they didn’t have any public process. They are a private company and they just made the change.

As a public utility district, we can’t do things the way PSE did then, and that’s fine with us. As I said, I believe we can do better, and I’d say in many ways we have done better. We have been working on a plan to replace the current meters for almost five years, and we have done so in many open public meetings, the minutes of which are all available on our website.

Could we have done a better job of involving the broader public? I think we could have, and we are trying to do it now. We are your PUD, and we are listening to your concerns. Whether we go forward with the meter replacement that has been proposed, or a different one, we will do it openly, and with the same goal we have had since I was hired on here almost five years ago: improving service and reliability for every one of our customers across all of Jefferson County.

Kevin Streett is the assistant general manager of the Jefferson County Public Utility District.