Last month, the Texas PUC issued its final report on smart meter accuracy testing. This Thursday, California’s PUC will issue its own report. The question: are the millions of electric smart meters being installed in those two states truly accurate?
Yes.
We’ll see what California says, but the conclusions in the Texas report were clear. These are the questions that Navigant Consulting, the report’s author, was tasked with:
- Is electricity usage accurately measured and recorded by the advanced meters?
- Is the recorded electricity usage accurately communicated from the advanced meters through the respective utility’s advanced metering systems for use in customer billing?
- Is recorded electricity usage higher on average for customers with advanced meters in comparison to customers with older electromechanical meters?
- Are there other potential factors or causes contributing to the observed higher incidence of meter and billing related customer complaints?
Navigant tested 5,627 meters in their investigation. Of these, 2 were inaccurate according to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard; i.e. 99.96% of the meters were accurate to within 2.0% of actual. 5,622 meters (99.91%) were accurate to within 0.5% of actual.
Which means? For a typical monthly bill of $150, all but 5 meters were within $0.75 of the actual amount.
By way of comparison, as I reported earlier this year, only 98.4% of existing, non-smart meters are within the ANSI standard. So while 2 meters in the Texas smart meter test were found outside the limits, the same test on existing, non-smart meters would have turned up 90 inaccurate meters – exactly 45 times as many bad meters.
The official conclusion: It is Navigant Consulting’s opinion… that the vast majority of advanced meters currently installed by Oncor, CenterPoint and AEP Texas are accurately measuring and recording electric usage, as well as communicating that information through the respective advanced metering systems for use in customer billing.
It’ll be interesting to see this Friday’s headlines on the California tests.