Dive Summary:
- Duke Energy and Duke Energy Progress are replacing old meters with smart meters for 240,000 customers in North Carolina.
- The roll out includes smart meter installs for 23,000 larges homes and small businesses in Wake and Durham counties; the remaining 217,000 smart meters will be installed across the Carolinas.
- According to Duke Energy spokeswoman Paige Layne, 68,000 older meters have already been replaced with new smart meters.
From the article:
The meters now being replaced are relatively old but were sophisticated for their time. They're known as "demand meters" because they record the largest of electricity that a customer uses during any 30-minute period in a given month and uses that amount in calculating the customer's monthly bill, alongside the customer's total monthly usage, Layne said. The existing meters had to be manually reset each month, a process that's automatic in the new meters.
Layne said Duke is using meters from a variety of vendors. There’s a good chance that some of them have a presence in Raleigh, given the dense cluster of smart-meter companies here. Itron (Nasdaq: ITRI) and privately held Elster Solutions and Sensus USA all have facilities in or just outside the city.