As shown in a new white paper, a Zpryme survey of 173 Smart Grid executives sponsored by Elster reveals that executives feel that 50 percent of utilities in the U.S. are ‘very familiar’ with smart electric meters. However, only 20 percent and 15 percent said utilities were ‘very familiar’ with smart gas and smart water meters, respectively.
The findings shown in the Elster Answers Smart Meter Trends 2012, released today reveal that “better management of energy and resource usage” will be the top benefit utility customers will receive from smart electric, gas, and water meters. Smart Grid executives rated ‘better peak energy usage control’ as the top benefit utilities would receive from smart electric meters. ‘Better asset management’ was rated as the top benefit utilities would receive from the deployment of smart water and gas meters.
Over the next five years, the survey findings also indicate that Asia will drive the growth of smart electric meters. However, North America is expected to drive the growth of both smart water and gas meters during this same time period.
“The finding that water and gas will be growth areas is not really a surprise. Many of our customers chose Elster to get a single system that manages both electricity and water or gas,” explains Dave Buster, Director of Marketing at Elster Solutions. “Elster has answers to the challenges facing multi-service utilities, including meter data collection, system management, and transition from older drive-by systems to more secure two-way systems that transition seamlessly to a fixed network if needed.”
“Based on the Elster sponsored survey, almost four out of ten respondents indicated that ’reliable communication networks/devices‘ was the technology most critical in smart meter deployments,” said Jason S. Rodriguez, CEO & Director of Research, Zpryme. “Utilities that design their smart meter and smart grid communications architecture to integrate with next generation (future) smart grid technologies will significantly reduce their overall implementation costs.”
About Elster
With more 170 years of experience, Elster Solutions has built a reputation on providing cutting-edge technologies to deliver world class products, systems and services to utility clients worldwide. Elster Solutions has two main areas of business – electricity metering products and Smart Metering and Smart Grid system solutions. Elster Solutions engineers fully interoperable smart electricity metering products through custom-made options for utility customers and award-winning end-to-end solutions for the Smart Grid with EnergyAxis, a multi-utility advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system for water, gas and electricity around the world.
Elster Solutions helps utilities improve their revenue cycle services, customer service, delivery reliability, and enable efficient energy usage by utility consumers through demand response and in home networking capabilities.
For more information about Elster Solutions, please visit http://www.elster.com and follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/EnergyAxis.
Contact
Dave Buster, Director, Solutions Architecture
Dave.Buster@us.elster.com
+1 919 212 5127
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zpryme
Residing in Austin, Zpryme is a research, media, and events agency with a focus on energy. Based on the creative direction of our associates Zpryme, produces influential research, Energy Thought Summit (ETS), and premium branding experiences that challenge the status quo.