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t a recent City Council meeting, Duane Cave, Public Affairs Manager for the Gas Company representing San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) announced the upcoming deployment of smart meters in the southern Orange County service area. The installation, he said will begin in January of next year up until April.
Already, more than 1.3 million electric and gas smart meters have been installed by SDG&E in San Diego County. The South OC installations on the other hand will only include electric meters put-up in about 120,000 consumers within the service area.
Cave said, the smart meter program is engineered with enhanced reliability in mind. He adds, “We’ve had the same technology for electricity for the last 100 years. This next 10 years is going to be a remarkable change with smart meters and smart grid and everything else coming through. We are going to replace the spinning-dial mechanical meters that you have today and put in digital meters that communicate back and forth on an hourly basis to SDG&E”.
A succesful rollout would make SDG&E the first major utility to have smart meters installed in its entire service area.
“Right now SDG&E has no idea when your electric service is off. The way we know is when you make a phone call to tell us... with a smart meter, we will know instantly if your electricity is off... we can send our resources out immediately to correct the problem,” Cave tells.
Aside from that, customers are also said to benefit from smart meters with its ability to provide by-the-hour/day consumption information. With such knowledge, users are supposed to better utilize the electricity service. Likewise, privacy concerns over meter readers coming over to consumers' residences will be eliminated as the new system would already allow utilities to remotely access usage data.
Soon, SDG&E is set to formally announce the installation through letters it would send to the residents. Via a phone call, residents would also get a notice of installation, three days prior to the actual schedule.
Source: http://www.smartmeters.com/the-news/1282-south-oc-to-get-smart-meters-installed-beginning-2011.html
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