Toronto Hydro-Electric System Limited (THESL) is one of the largest local distribution companies in Canada, delivering electricity through a complex distribution network to 697,000 commercial and residential customers in the Toronto Area, approximately 18.5% of the electricity in the province of Ontario. With energy conservation as a top priority, THESL has been at the forefront of Smart Grid development since 2006, when they launched their Advanced Metering Initiative, designed to transition the entire customer base to smart meters and TOU pricing by the summer of 2010.

By providing usage information and TOU pricing, their customers will have the information to make intelligent choices around when they use energy and the motivation to shift their usage to off-peak periods. The program is supported by “Get Smart Toronto,” a marketing campaign intended to raise awareness of the change and promote its benefits in order to smooth the transition for customers.

THESL selected eMeter’s EnergyIP in order to enable them to accomplish a full-scale rollout of Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) and smart meters to enable TOU pricing, with simultaneous upgrading of existing related infrastructure with limited customer complaints/inquiries. This project will be the first mandatory large-scale residential TOU program in the world and supports other key Smart Grid functionality, such as outage management. Toronto Hydro deployed Energy IP in 2008 to perform as an Operational Data Store (ODS) to handle the data from the AMI system, provide a virtualized interface to the centralized MDM/R, perform customer presentment data management and demand response program management.  The ODS integrates into the system that links CIS (Customer Information System), AMCCs (Advanced Metering Control Computers), Mobile Data, EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) and other THESL systems in support of business operations as they come to exist with the increasing use of commercial interval and residential smart metering.

eMeter EnergyIP is currently collecting data for 600K meters and today processes TOU billing for the 500K customers, and will ramp to 600K customers by the end of 2010.