ComEd will begin installing smart meters in Lake Forest and Lake Bluff in June.
Homes and businesses that currently have electro-mechanical meters will see those replaced with new digital meters.
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“Those meters aren’t even manufactured anymore,” said Mike McMahan, vice president of advanced meter infrastructure implementation at ComEd. “It’s time to move to the digital age.”
In 2011, the General Assembly approved the Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act, also known as the smart grid bill. In late 2013, ComEd began installing smart meters. On March 23 of this year, ComEd reached the halfway point of the project with 2.1 million smart meters installed out of the 4.2 million planned, McMahan said.
Smart meters contain a computer chip and two radios. One radio communicates with ComEd, while the other radio can communicate with the customer. The meters can provide usage information to customers the following day through the ComEd website, or in real time to customers who purchase a device.
Officials say smart meters offer several advantages, including their ability to detect power outages remotely.
“The smart meters come with a functionality called the last gasp,” McMahan said. “If they lose power for any reason, they will send a signal to us saying they lost power. We get that signal and can send a truck to investigate. We can also send a signal to the meter that asks if it is on or off and then send a truck only when it needs to go.”
ComEd can also tell customers who install a ComEd app on their smart phones whether the problem is an actual power outage, or just a circuit breaker. Again, that allows ComEd to send out trucks only when there is an actual outage.
For customers, smart meters mean ComEd will no longer send out estimated bills when meter readers can’t gain access.
“Nobody likes an estimated bill,” McMahan said.
Jim Chilsen of the Citizen’s Utility Board agrees. The board is a non-partisan consumer watchdog group created by the General Assembly in 1983 to fight for the rights of utility customers.
“One of the biggest complaints we get from customers is that the power company estimated my electrical use for three months and underestimated it and then I got this balloon bill,” Chilsen said. “[With smart meters] its virtually eliminated.”
Customers also have the potential to save money by signing up for something called “peak time savings”. On hot days when electrical usage is high, ComEd will ask people to reduce their electrical usage by paying customers $1 per kilowatt hour if they use less than ComEd calculates they normally would, McMahan said.
ComEd will install most of the 8,700 smart meters in Lake Forest in June and July, and most of the 2,600 meters in Lake Bluff during June. ComEd will notify customers at 90 days, 60 days, 30 days and 10 days in advance of the replacement.
Contractors doing the actual installation are from a company called Corix, but will carry ComEd contractor badges and have the ComEd logo on their vehicles.
“If they can’t produce a badge, close the door and call police,” McMahan said. “We will never ask for money. If they do, close the door and call police. It’s not us.”
Chilsen said the Citizen’s Utility Board is cautiously optimistic that the improvements will lead to real benefits for consumers.
“Our current electrical system is worn out and pretty costly to Illinois consumers,” Chilsen said. “There’s just a lot of waste in the current electrical system we can reduce. If done right, these new meters are a big step in the right direction.”
More information on smart meters is available at ComEd.com and the citizensutilityboard.org.
Twitter: @reporterdude
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