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JEA Passes Half Million Mark on New Meter Installation
Jacksonville, FL (April 12, 2005) - For Jacksonville residents, seeing a person coming into your backyard to read your electric or water meter will soon become rare sight.
JEA has replaced or retrofitted more than 570,000 electric and water meters since it implemented its Network Meter Reading (NMR) project four years ago. The new electronic meters, which use a radio frequency to transmit information to computer hardware, will eventually allow JEA to read meters from a computer screen.
"When the system is fully deployed, we expect the project will save JEA about $17 to $20 million a year compared to the system we have in place today," said Wanyonyi J. Kendrick, JEA vice president of technology services.
For customers, benefits include fewer visits to check meters, better individual outage information on homes and businesses with quicker power restoration and better meter accuracy.
Many of these customer benefits also will reduce JEA costs over time, requiring the utility to roll fewer trucks and people to read meters, virtually eliminating manual re-reading meters for accuracy, and reducing the need hunt down individual outage problems.
Most meters for residential customers have been installed. JEA is now focusing on about 24,000 mostly commercial water and electric meters, which require more scheduling and time to install. The utility expects to have all of the nearly 700,000 installations completed by mid-2006.
The $150 million project, approved by the JEA Board of Directors in 2001, is one of the largest of its type in Florida and the largest involving water meters in the nation. There are more than 150 similar systems under way nationally - comprising more than 11 million meters at 140 utilities.
Based on the experiences of other utilities, including California utilities, Kansas City Power & Light, Wisconsin PSC, Exelon (PECO), CINergy, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Puget Sound Energy, a fully-deployed system can generate savings of $2.87 per meter per month.
JEA is the eighth largest community-owned electric utility in America, providing electric, water and sewer services to more than 750,000 accounts in Northeast Florida.
Background on the JEA Network Meter Reading (NMR) Project
Project Overview
JEA's NMR Project will improve customer service and satisfaction, providing better system reliability and accuracy and additional operational cost savings. JEA started its NMR initiative in 2001 and plans to complete it by early 2006. The project covers installation of a Cellnet radio frequency fixed network and fiber backhaul infrastructure, replacement of 680,000 electric and water meters, and development of advanced Meter Data Management System to take advantage of volumes of meter data and to interface with other JEA systems.
JEA NMR System Cost
Capital Cost - Infrastructure Deployment, $150 million over five years
Operating and Maintenance Cost -- $6.5 million annually
Current Status
| Total Residential Electric Meters: |
383,000 |
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Total Residential Water Meters: |
268,000 |
| Installed to Date: |
372,000 |
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Installed to Date: |
204,000 |
| Total Commercial Electric Meters: |
20,000 |
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Total Commercial Water Meters: |
10,000 |
| Installed to Date: |
5,000 |
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Installed to Date: |
1,000 |
Benefits for JEA Customers
- Accurate billing for all electric and water customers
- Proactive outage identification for single meters and reactive outage identification after a system wide storm restoration, not requiring customer calls
- Better integration of technology to allow quicker, and more accurate damage assessment and restoration after a hurricane
- Improved proactive intelligence on transformer failures - preventing unplanned outages
- Addressing customer privacy and JEA employee safety concerns with less frequent visits from JEA meter readers
- Better access to daily customer information for Customer Care Consultants
- Virtual Move In and Out process, enabling quicker initial and final bills
- Quicker identification of meter tampering that may result in serious or fatal injury to a customer or a JEA employee
- Providing the platform for additional customer benefits later, such as advanced warning to customers of potential high bills, flexible billing periods for customers, customer access to usage data, electric and water system wide conservation initiatives, etc.
Benefits to JEA - Highlights
- Ensure accuracy of system meter assets and installations, saving between $5 to 10 million annually
- Enable virtual connect/disconnect with on-demand reads, saving about $2 million annually
- Improved Outage responsiveness, saving up to $1 million annually based on industry numbers
- Better unbilled and tampering detection, saving between 500,000 to $1 million annually
- Better System Planning and Transformer Load Management saving between 500,000 to $1 million annually
- Lower generating plant capital needs - a one percent reduction in system load results in $30 million in potential cost deferral (for 30 megawatt load savings) and a $1.5 million cost of capital avoidance.
Automated Meter Reading (AMR) Nationally
As of early 2002, 148 AMR projects were under way comprising of a total of 10.25 million meters at 140 utilities.
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