Duane Hicks
With the Ontario government having a goal to install a “smart meter” in every Ontario home and small business by 2010, the Fort Frances Power Corp. will begin to roll out its installation program here starting Monday (May 25).
FFPC CEO Joerg Ruppenstein said the meter exchange is taking place here and elsewhere because smart meters are a key part of an overall strategy to reduce electricity consumption and peak electricity use, as well as support a “conservation culture” within the province.
“The government is really pushing renewable energy, and there’s a lot of advances that have been made in technology,” Ruppenstein explained.
“Really, metering hasn’t changed in a long, long time,” he noted. “If you look at your 1930 meter, it’s probably the same as the ones a lot of homes have right now; the same technology, just a newer model.
“I use the analogy that changing over to smart meters is like going from a rotary phone to a cell phone,” added Ruppenstein.
“It’s an absolute leap in technology, which is very exciting and offers a lot of functionality to help us understand our distribution system better, understand our customers better, give us better insight for providing maintenance and providing better service.
“We’re very excited about the technology.”
The FFPC has spent the last 18 months procuring the “smart” system they and their regional partners will be using—the Elster Energy Access Smart Metering System—and are confident they’ve made the right choice for Fort Frances.
It also is the same system about one-third of the province will be using.
“We’ve procured a system, we know who our vendors are, we’ve purchased the smart meters for the mass roll-out,” Ruppenstein noted. “They’re sitting in our warehouse right now.
“[This week] is a test week. We are going to make sure our all our installation tools—we have what’s called a workforce management tool—are working properly to expedite the roll-out to make sure there’s no hiccups.
“The week after that, we’re going to be in full deployment,” said Ruppenstein.
Installation
All FFPC customers will receive a general notice of when the installations will be taking place. Installation in each neighbourhood will be spread out throughout the year.
“It’s a simple meter swap-out,” said Ruppenstein, explaining installation crews will come to customers’ doors, knock on them, identify themselves, and let the residents know they are there to remove the old meter and install the new one.
Meter installers will have FFPC and Olameter identification signs in their vehicles, and will carry personal identification tags (Olameter is the meter services company assisting the FFPC with the smart meter installation).
Look for both of these logos on both the vehicle and on the personal ID that will be carried. If a customer has any concerns, they’re encouraged to call the FFPC office at 274-9291.
Ruppenstein cautioned FFPC customers must note the difference between an installer and someone from an electricity retailer wanting them to switch from the FFPC, adding FFPC installers will not ask to see a customer’s bill and will not ask them to sign anything.
“It’s just a meter change. You don’t have to sign anything,” he stressed.
“You don’t have to show your bill, and you do not have to sign anything,” echoed Lori Cain, cost and regulatory analyst for the FFPC.
The installation only will take five-10 minutes to complete, during which time the customer will need to shut off their home or business power for a short period.
If the customer is not home and the installation crew cannot access their meter, the customer will receive a phone call from a call centre to try and co-ordinate an installation at the customer’s convenience.
The phone call will be from Olameter, and those with call display will see “Olameter” come up. Don’t worry, it’s not a telemarketer, Ruppenstein said.
If the installation crew can access the meter, they will proceed with it and then leave some information to let them know their smart meter has been installed.
Smart meters will be installed in all residential and small business locations—even if they are with an electricity retailer and not the FFPC.
Rates will be determined by the terms and conditions of the retailer contract a customer chooses to sign. Customers will need to find out the impact of time-of-use rates from their retailer.
What are smart meters?
Smart meters are new electronic hydro meters which, over the next year, will be installed at every residence and small business in town, replacing the current ones.
A total of about 3,800 will be installed (the old ones will be recycled).
Cain explained that for about the next year, the smart meters will serve much like the current ones do, and continue to be read manually in order to report electricity consumption information.
But later next year, the meters will go “on-line” as part of a complex communications network and start being used to their real potential.
The smart meters will record electricity consumption information on an hourly basis and report it via wireless technology back to one of six data collectors that will be located at strategic places in town (they work kind of like cell phone towers), which, in turn, will relay that information back to control computers operated by the FFPC.
The FFPC then will send this information to a provincial secure smart meter data repository, which calculates how much electricity was used and during what time of day. The same data then will go back to the FFPC so it can be used to prepare customers’ monthly bills.
Currently, old electromechanical meters only measure how much electricity is used in total from one reading to the next, and have to be read manually in order to report that information.
By 2011, smart meters will allow for the introduction of “time of use” (TOU) electricity rates—giving people a new way to manage their consumption and reduce costs.
As it stands now, there is little incentive to manage electricity use because prices remain the same regardless of the time of day. This is because the current meters can’t report when electricity is used.
TOU rates will vary throughout the day, being more expensive at peak times and less expensive during off-peak periods. Knowing when these times are, people will be able to choose when and how they use electricity.
Depending on the demand and availability of supply, electricity market prices will rise and fall over the day and drop over night. Other variables include days of the week (week, weekend, and holidays) and seasons (summer versus winter).
Since rates will vary, customers will be more likely to reduce their consumption at times of peak demand and shift their consumption to time of lower demand.
TOU periods will be classified as on peak (cost and demand are highest), mid-peak (cost and demand are moderate), and off-peak (cost and demand are lowest).
“I think the Town of Fort Frances has a great deal of people who are environmentally concerned, and right now their off-peak efforts aren’t being rewarded because we are not able to bill for time of use rates,” said Cain.
“This will reward them for their conservation efforts.”
Smart meters will store customer electricity use information, allowing them to review that data through a secure webpage or via telephone. As well, their monthly bills will show their daily consumption and not be based on estimates.
TOU rates have been set by the Ontario Energy Board, but a start date for that pricing is not yet in place for the FFPC. Ruppenstein estimated the FFPC will not be able to offer TOU rates until 2011.
For the near future, smart meters here will work just as the old ones did. Billing will not change until the implementation of TOU rates, prior to which the FFPC will notify its customers.
There will not be a smart meter line item on FFPC customers’ bills once they have them installed. Rather, the cost of smart meters is being recovered though electricity distribution rates paid by all customers the same way that costs for existing meters and services are recovered right now.
While it is costing the FFPC and its customers to implement smart meters, they will realize energy efficiencies and cost-savings in the long run.
“There’s a lot of efficiencies that can be gained,” noted Ruppenstein. “Due to the fact that we operate non-profit, whatever efficiencies will be realized over the next few years, as our business model changes a little bit, those efficiencies will be passed on back to the customer.”
Smart meters also will be very useful to the FFPC as a diagnostic tool, said Cain.
“We can actually tell who is out of power if we have an outage, even if the customer isn’t home to report that,” she explained. “We can actually read voltage levels off the meters.
“If someone complains about voltage problems, we can ‘ping’ or ask the meter what are the neighbours looking like. We can actually use it as a tool.”
“There will be lots of operational data accessible to us that is going to give us insight into our distribution system like we’ve never had before,” echoed Ruppenstein.
“We’ll be able to flag these types of quality issues, so at the end of the day we’ll be able to provide better customer service.”
Looking further down the road, Ruppenstein said renewable energy is the way of the future, and as more and more people start to use small-scale generation like solar panels, smart meters are capable of measuring bi-directional power flow.
“This means that if a customer, in years to come, were to put in small-scale generation at their location, this type of meter, if it was re-programmed, is able to measure power into the customers’ premises and out of the customers’ premises, and that’s really going to become more and more common as time goes on,” he explained.
Ruppenstein also foresees electric cars making their way into Canada in the next five-10 years.
“We’re planting the infrastructure that’s required for the needs of the future, which is really exciting,” he enthused.
Smart meters also lay the groundwork for water meters and natural gas meters, among other things.
“Basically, what we are putting in place is a communication network,” Ruppenstein said. “Think of it as a computer connection—it’s going to be a way that devices can talk through this network.
“It includes water meters, gas meters, and devices that can be located inside a customers’ home, an in-house display.
“Conceptually, at the end of the day, a customer might get a total energy bill, where they can then compare electricity versus gas and get a real understanding of their total energy usage, not just electricity,” he noted.
Cain added if the town chooses to implement electronic water meters, they could use the same data collectors the FFPC’s smart meters will be using and thus avoid duplication.
