Advanced meters make a difference: meters can improve energy service quality. (Critical Issues: Power Quality and Reliability).

New technology, especially silicon chips or computer power, has dramatically improved many products. Silicon substrates are slowly beginning to replace the rotating disc and jewel bearings of traditional residential electric meters, creating new and improved potential for entire classes of energy users. Advanced meters place electronics nearby, either in adjunct boxes or under the glass, allowing the capture, totaling, and transmission of usage data to meter reading departments. Howard Scott, author and recognized authority on automatic meter reading systems (AMR), indicates the AMR adoption rate for U.S. electric utilities is approaching 13% of the electric meter population.

The public normally understands very little about energy reliability and quality. Today's business environment is changing, however, and now includes small office-home office (SOHO) telecommuters from larger firms and families doing e-commerce while watching television.

Quality, in their view, relates to sags, surges, and outages. But the growing use of increasingly sophisticated electronic devices has heightened their awareness and sensitivity to power quality issues. Unfortunately residential electric service has no metrics or service level agreements for availability or quality levels. In most cases, tariffs protect the utility's right to adjust, curtail, or suspend service to protect overall system safety and integrity.

Power quality issues more directly impact businesses, significantly impacting processes, products, and profits. As a result, advanced metering will become increasingly critical, and utilities and their customers are likely to jointly evolve incentive structures and service level agreement metrics. These new metrics likely will provide rewards and penalties that offer cost savings by encouraging installed power generation infrastructure to shave peak rates or thresholds.

To date, few products have addressed both the utilities' needs for remote consumption metering, control, and monitoring the consumer' s demand for better power quality. Many AMR devices can report outages and restoration, and some utilities have incorporated this function into their power outage management systems. However, few residential AMR devices have the capabilities to measure sags, surges, or other more subtle power quality factors.

Mechanics

Most utilities have departments that focus on quality and reliability issues. These departments use metrics such as the system average interruption frequency index (SAIFI), system average interruption duration index (SAIDI), customer average interruption frequency index (CAIDI), and momentary average interruption frequency index (MAIFI). Typically these departments rely more on SAIDI and SAIFI and overlook the impact of these system events on the end user.