Trilliant Inc. has completed its pilot and has now been selected to implement the smart metering communications infrastructure at Burbank Water and Power in Burbank, California. Burbank Water and Power (BWP) is a community-owned utility that has served the business and residents of Burbank with water and power since 1913.
BWP, a recipient of an American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) Grant, deployed approximately 1,000 commercial and residential meters during Phase I of its smart grid pilot program. As part of the initial deployment, all of BWP’s customers using 250 kW and above were converted to time-of-use rates. BWP relied on Trilliant’s SecureMesh communications infrastructure and UnitySuite head-end software to automate meter reading and deliver daily reports on late meters, outages, meter tampering, and more.
The next phase of BWP’s smart grid program will deploy smart meters to all remaining business and residences in the utility area by year end 2011 amounting to more than 50,000 meters. BWP will use Trilliant’s solution to help manage service requests, customer inquiries, meter reading and service interruptions.
“One of our operational tenets is that you can’t improve what you can’t measure,” according to Joanne Fletcher, BWP Assistant General Manager/Customer Service & Marketing. “Trilliant provided us with reliable and actionable data on both commercial and residential customers; the kind of data we will now rely on for future smart grid applications as we expand our energy management initiatives.”
Trilliant was selected as the prime contractor for communications infrastructure and head-end software and will be deploying GE smart meters throughout BWP’s service area. Trilliant is joined in this full deployment by eMeter, whose eMeter EnergyIP software provides the meter data management platform, and by Siemens Energy, Inc., who provides installation, configuration and commissioning services for this project. Siemens Smart Grid Applications managed the integration between Trilliant’s communication networks and BWP’s utility enterprise systems to enable BWP to improve customer service and manage peak demand.
