Mile-High Metering

(Originally posted on waterefficiency.net)

By Elizabeth Cutright
Editor
Water Efficiency

This week (Sept. 14, 2009) I’m in Denver, CO, attending the Utilimetrics Smart Metering Conference and Exposition, aka Autovation. The conference covers metering primarily in the electric utility industry, but there’s plenty of discussion on the role AMR and AMI play in the quest for efficient water resource management.
As you know, automatic meter reading (AMR) involves the automatic collection of data from meters (water, gas, and electric). Once the data is collected, it is transferred to a central database for analysis and metering. Of greatest benefit to a water utility is the possibility of measuring actual consumption, thereby enabling accurate billing and a more in depth and demand-sensitive resource management.
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), on the other hand, pushes data management to another level by including the measurement, collection, and analysis of meter-acquired data. AMI includes not only hardware, but the master data management (MDM) software and customer interface that makes use of all the statistics and information collected, including water usage and billing. Another AMI benefit is the ability to craft sophisticated demand-response solutions.
I’m excited to see the newest and most innovative AMR/AMI technology that’ll be on display here in Denver, and you can rest assured that I’ll be passing along everything I’ve to learned to you.
In the meantime, check out some of our past AMR/AMI articles. They run the gamut from project profiles on one particular success story, to technologically focused pieces that will give you the basics, to grander articles that fix AMR/AMI within the bigger picture of water efficiency and resource management.