Technology and electricity often have a symbiotic relationship. While many people recognize the clear need for electricity to keep their various devices powered, the required technologies used to deliver electricity to end users are less front-of-mind.
As the power sector evolves, utilities are using an increasing array of technologies to keep up with changing customer expectations, update infrastructure, and manage their systems. For public power utilities, leveraging the power of digital innovation involves both recognizing how and when the efficiencies gained justify the upfront cost and planning strategic approaches to implementation.
The reasons a utility takes these technological leaps might be as varied as the options available, but for public power, the decision to explore new technology often comes down to the mission: Can it cost-effectively help the utility meet the needs of its customers by ensuring a more reliable, resilient, and sustainable future grid?
Moving to Two-Way
Seattle City Light in Washington views technology as more than a support function — it sees technology as an enabler of its mission. The public power utility recently released its strategic plan for the next five years. The plan provides a road map for growth by positioning technology as the catalyst behind improving the grid, enhancing the customer experience, increasing resiliency, and promoting sustainability for the more than 500,000 business and residential customers the utility serves.
“We see technology as the driving force to improve grid reliability, and we are at the early stage of planning major initiatives,” said Mujib Lodhi, chief information officer for Seattle City Light. “We’re not doing it for the sake of doing it. We aim to change the way we do business to serve our customers better.”
Part of that change is not only recognizing what technology the utility can implement but also understanding how the utility can leverage new energy technologies that customers choose to adopt. One of the initiatives in the strategic plan is distributed energy resource integration through a DER management system, or DERMS.
“In Seattle, demand from electrification is growing faster than expected,” Lodhi said. “We’re using technology to balance the grid load through advanced analytics.”
Historically, utility operations have been built around managing central generation, where energy flows one way — from the utility to the customer. The increase in DERs such as rooftop solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage systems results in customer-generated energy that could go back into the grid to help balance increased demand and mitigate peak load.
Seattle City Light expects the DERMS to create a two-way grid system that will allow excess power generated from behind-the-meter resources to flow back to the grid through arrangements like net metering.
“The customer will have more freedom to generate power and put it back into the system,” Lodhi said.
The system will provide Seattle City Light with more visibility into DERs, including generation and cost factors that are hard to project because the resources exist on the customer side of the meter. It also will manage the charging and discharging of electric vehicles and other energy storage systems, supporting vehicle and building electrification and enhancing grid stability, according to the strategic plan.
Deploying a DERMS is a significant undertaking, requiring time and effort to understand the need, gather analytics, create the technology, and deploy the system.
“We are planning and understanding the business requirements of the system,” Lodhi said. “We are in the early planning phase. It will be a very systematic implementation.”
The two-way grid is one part of a broader effort for Seattle City Light to modernize its overall grid and improve reliability. It also plans to use an advanced distribution management system, or ADMS, which provides intelligence and increases insight into the grid, to create a “self-healing” system.
The aim with an ADMS is to make grids more resilient and reduce downtime. The technology is compatible with sensors, which can be installed in the field to allow crews to pinpoint the exact locations of outages. These efforts improve customer relations by better communicating outages and more accurately estimating restoration times.
The strategic plan also includes an effort to offer large customers options to meet energy goals through “bundled” energy products consisting of renewable generation. That effort includes constructing new solar resources in the Pacific Northwest, with projects scheduled to come online this year.
As Seattle City Light dives into these major initiatives, it is building infrastructure to support the investments. The utility is enhancing its workforce by upskilling current employees with the abilities needed to create a more progressive utility service while also attracting new talent with these skills.
A Better Network
Investing in technology isn’t only justified in utilities that serve a large customer base.
Approximately two years ago, Fairport Electric in New York began a journey to deploy advanced metering infrastructure to gain more insight into customers’ energy consumption with enhanced meter feedback and data. The new system replaces the utility’s automated meter reading system, which had been in place for more than 20 years.
Fairport Electric began preparing for the system upgrade by reviewing vendors and technology options. AMI meters vary significantly in capabilities, from more basic usage tracking to smart meters with real-time insight into power consumption. Fairport chose a middle option from Landis+Gyr to cater to the majority of its customers’ needs and will offer more advanced smart meters to interested customers for an additional fee.
Deploying an AMI system is no easy feat, requiring significant investment and a team-wide commitment to success.
“You have to be flexible and patient, because it won’t work smoothly from the beginning. You have to really dig in,” said Matt Hegarty, superintendent at Fairport Electric. “It’s not handed to you so you can push a button to make it work. You have to understand the intricate parts of the system.”
Over the winter of 2024–2025, Fairport Electric began switching all its 18,000 meters. The deployment was driven by its own workforce of 16 lineworkers, who continued managing normal operations, including pole changeouts and responding to outages, on top of the meter implementation.
To assist with managing the installation process, Fairport Electric’s team used an AMI platform and process from Meridian Cooperative. When lineworkers arrived at a customer site, they used iPads to take a picture of the old meter, document the reading, install the new meter, and take a picture of the new meter. All that information was uploaded to the platform, which connected to Fairport Electric’s billing system.
“We built automated systems with their guidance that made the process easy. To remove an older system previously, we would need to do two service orders per customer to [decommission] the old meter and start the new meter,” said Hegarty. “That process was basically automated with our customer service team, which allowed us to complete that process in just six months with our own forces.”
Scheduled outages for installing the new meters needed to be carefully coordinated to keep customers happy during the cold New York winter. Fairport Electric communicated the outage ahead of time through text or email, so customers could prepare for the short lapse in power.
Lauren Nice, a project manager for Fairport, noted that the AMI deployment was a chance to show line crews how they could incorporate technology into their work. “They hadn’t used tech often, so it was a good introduction. In the future, they can use it in operations beyond meter changes.”
John O’Leary, a system technician in Fairport, managed the IT effort during deployment.
“Projects like these are huge lifts,” Hegarty said. “John’s an electrical engineer. It took someone of that talent to make sure this would work. You have to be able to understand networks.”
To ensure successful deployment, O’Leary makes sure the network remains up and running, with all systems communicating properly while troubleshooting challenges as they arise.
“AMI is a system that offers you incredible insight into what’s happening at every single meter,” he said. “It’s great to have and see it, but it only works if you pay attention to it — and it requires pretty constant attention.”
Fairport is already seeing how the deployment is supporting its improved service. The new meters provide insight into each customer, including power consumption and status. The utility can quickly determine whether power is on at each location, improving outage response times and customer service.
“We can quickly see whether an outage affects one customer or the whole street,” Hegarty said. “If 100 customers are out, we can determine the upstream device that caused the issue, so we can lessen the outage time and make restoration more efficient.”
The new meters also allow Fairport Electric to complete many customer requests — like final readings and reconnections after nonpayment disconnections — remotely, significantly reducing the amount of work for its small field crew. Next on the team’s agenda is installing advanced smart meters for interested customers.
“We have customers that want the capabilities of the smart meter, like the ability to track how much energy their laptops or appliances are using, as well as how to conserve electricity,” Hegarty said. “All of that [artificial intelligence] is built into the full-blown smart meter.”
The AMI system includes room for future expansion. Fairport Electric recently launched a new service portal to provide customers with more access to their accounts. In the future, the portal will connect to the AMI system, so customers will be able to track their usage in real time. Currently, the portal allows customers to manage their accounts and pay their bills virtually.
