Colorado Springs Utilities, a community-owned utility serving customers in Colorado Springs and the surrounding area, has surpassed 280,000 endpoints deployed in its electric, gas, water, and wastewater advanced metering project that started in 2005. When the roll-out is complete in 2010, Colorado Springs Utilities will be using the utility-owned RF mesh network to read over 528,000 electric, gas, and water meters, maintaining its status as the largest combined, four-service advanced metering project in the United States.
Colorado Springs Utilities anticipates that, when fully deployed, the Cellnet+Hunt system will save the utility over $6 million dollars per year in hard operating cost, not including the operational benefits the utility expects to achieve through the deployment of a fixed network.
Based on Cellnet+Hunt’s RF mesh communications network, Colorado Springs Utilities’ deployment positions the utility to potentially leverage its installed network communications infrastructure for smart grid and other energy management applications in the future.
Colorado Springs Utilities recently finished third overall for customer satisfaction among medium sized utilities and sixth in the nation for overall utility residential customer satisfaction in the 2007 JD Powers study. Colorado Springs Utilities also earned high marks in the study for customer service and power quality and reliability, taking second and third nationwide in these areas.
Cellnet+Hunt Vice President of System Delivery Clark Korbisch said, “The Colorado Springs Utilities project success to date demonstrates Cellnet+Hunt has the proven technology and dependable service needed to support the largest projects in the utility market. We continue to work with Colorado Springs Utilities to ensure that they can operate and manage their system in a way that delivers the best overall results. ”
Cellnet+Hunt offers two-way asynchronous RF mesh network combining AMI, DA, SCADA and multi-service utility meter operation functions into one Smart Grid network platform. Cellnet+Hunt’s RF mesh systems are currently operational at over 200 utilities worldwide.
