As the first wave of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) begins to reach the end of its expected life, new meter technologies—including next-generation “AMI 2.0” meters—promise to offer a host of new benefits to utilities and customers alike. However, in an inflationary rate environment where each of the last three years has seen record-setting utility rate increase requests, it can be increasingly challenging for utilities to balance the substantial costs of new AMI investments with the need for granular and timely data to meet evolving needs in critical areas such as customer experience and decarbonization. The good news is that while meters have evolved, so too has wireless non-meter technology that can enable a more modern, pragmatic AMx framework, allowing utilities to unlock new value from legacy, current, and future meter hardware at low cost while reducing the risks associated with further investments in new technology.

Compared with previous AMI deployments, the increased technological sophistication of AMI 2.0 adds significant new risks for utilities (and ultimately their customers), including:

  • Increased risk of technological obsolescence before the expected end of meter life due to expanded “grid edge” computation hardware that is built into the meter, and a focus on apps running within the meter itself (for context, just imagine trying to run modern software on a 20-year-old computer).
  • Higher costs due to both expanded meter hardware and networking requirements
  • Proposed incremental benefits over previous generations of metering hardware that are often unclear or vaguely-defined (even in regulatory filings).
  • New cybersecurity attack vectors due to increased connectivity (particularly to customers’ home Wi-Fi networks) and lack of clear responsibility and accountability for who should maintain ongoing security updates and patches.
  • The use of proprietary technology, particularly in the AMI head-end system (HES), that makes it difficult for multiple vendors to compete, limiting innovation and reducing utilities’ abilities to take a best-of-breed approach to meter investments that could unlock new use cases at lower costs.
  • The use of outdated single-purpose communications networks—such as mesh networks—that slow the speed at which data can be shared with utilities and limit utilities’ ability to take advantage of real-time applications such as DER coordination or load flexibility.

If utilities are to maximize the likelihood of success with new metering investments and quickly realize the many potential benefits of granular, timely consumption data, AMI 2.0 by itself isn’t enough. Whether utilities are exploring AMI 2.0 or trying to unlock more value from their existing meters, an AMx framework can help to de-risk their investments and reduce costs by:

  • Moving computation and data analysis fully into the cloud to reduce the risk of technological obsolescence and allow for the use of less expensive meter hardware.
  • Allowing for smaller-scale, more agile demonstrations of new metering hardware to ensure that a particular approach or technology will be cost-effective and able to deliver the expected benefits.
  • Reducing cybersecurity risks by greatly reducing the number of potential attack vectors (since the data backhaul is more centralized and secure, and data is shared only after it’s uploaded to the cloud, reducing direct connections to customer networks).
  • Helping utilities move away from proprietary systems and networks through a vendor-agnostic framework that enables best-of-breed infrastructure investments and data management, uses existing high-speed communications networks to expand real-time applications, and can even provide a centralized platform on which to compare data from electric, gas, and water meters for coordinated planning.

Enabled by new approaches to wireless meter reading, utilities that embrace an AMx strategy can unlock highly granular and more timely data from nearly any meter while supporting more agile, no-regrets hardware upgrades when needed and maintaining downward pressure on rates. Now more than ever, a shift in thinking from AMI to AMx can help unlock new value from existing infrastructure, ensure that both utilities and their customers will realize the benefits of real-time data as quickly as possible (in months rather than years), enable sophisticated multi-resource system planning, and support a more affordable approach to meter infrastructure investments that drives increased innovation while better supporting customers.