United Illuminating Benefits from Gridstream MDMS Flexibility and Time Saving Automation
Overview
The United Illuminating Company (UI) is a New Haven, Connecticut investor owned electric distribution company established in 1899. It serves over 325,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in the Greater New Haven and Bridgeport areas.
In 2010, UI upgraded their one-way daily meter reading system, installed in 1999, to a hybrid AMR/AMI solution, a combination of one-way meters and FOCUS® AXR-SD and FOCUS AXR (two-way) meters, using the Gridstream® RF mesh network. From the start, the UI goal was to tap into daily and interval data in billing and distribution operations for:
- Time of Day (TOD) Billing
- Outage detection
- Theft detection (non-technical loss)
- Renewable energy program support
- Customer Care Center support
- State of Connecticut voluntary and mandated programs for rate design and energy strategies
For its vision, UI is seen as one of the leaders in the utility industry. The ability to leverage timely, accurate data can fuel many utility programs to improve consumer choice and the ability to lower energy bills through pricing and renewable energy programs. In addition, UI sought to gain operational improvements by leveraging data to augment outage detection and response times as well as quickly finding revenue leakage scenarios by detecting tampering and energy diversion.
