After years of focused effort, Salt River Project recently implemented an asset management program. The program entailed a standard set of T&D work and asset management business processes that represented an 83% consolidation. The remaining 17% were unique processes that did not fit into a standard.
Now, SRP has announced that it will deploy meter data management to manage more than 900,000 planned advanced metering devices throughout the utility's service territory. SRP provides electricity and water to customers in Phoenix and throughout central Arizona. Named for the major river that provides water to the area — the Salt River — SRP is the nation's third-largest public power utility and metropolitan Phoenix's largest raw water supplier.
The meter data management system will be Elster's EnergyICT EIServer, and it will be managing EnergyAxis meters. SRP estimates that the Elster EnergyAxis solution has enabled the Arizona utility to remotely address more than 1.2 million service orders, save more than 401,000 labor hours, avoid more than two million driving miles and conserve 198,000 gallons of fuel.
The EnergyICT MDM deployment empowers SRP with the intelligence required to make more informed energy management and pricing decisions, enhance operational processes and deliver advanced customer services.
EnergyICT's MDM and network management solution will perform detailed smart meter data analysis on information collected from every Elster AMI endpoint, providing additional benefits to SRP's customers, including flexible pricing strategies in the form of time-of-use (TOU).
The MDM deployment will provide SRP with a number of operational benefits, such as work-flow management to integrate processes and data, improved sampling and expanded data options for load research, more accurate forecasting to improve power buy and sell decisions, real-time data processing, asset optimization and demand response. The implementation of the EnergyICT MDM system is currently underway and expected to complete in July 2011.
SRP has paved the way for smart meter technology among U.S. electric utilities, with focused consumer initiatives that have resulted in several J.D. Power and Associates honors for customer satisfaction in business and residential electric service. In October 2009, the Department of Energy awarded a matching grant to SRP under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's SGIG initiative to help further its Smart Grid deployment.
