What's Changing?
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What's Changing
See how our latest changes are making it all easier.
More for you.
A smart grid means more options – giving you more control over your energy use.
Before Smart Grid | New Smart Grid Capabilities |
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Customers have limited choices. | The smart grid is paving the way for more products and services to better suit individual customer needs. These include energy- and cost-saving programs. |
Capabilities before grid modernization | New smart grid-enabled capabilities |
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Often, bills had to be estimated until your meter could be physically read. | New advanced meters send usage information directly to us, so your bills no longer have to be estimated. |
Wait-times lasted hours or even days to have new service connected or old service disconnected. | With smart meters, we can remotely connect or disconnect service. |
Monthly energy use information was received weeks after the end of the monthly billing cycle. | With more accurate information from digital technology, simply use online tools to access near real-time information about your energy usage. |
Before smart grid | New smart grid capabilities |
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Linemen are deployed to a general area of the grid – sometimes a stretch of more than 30 miles of line. They have to drive or walk along the line until they locate the cause of the outage. | Smart grid operators can pinpoint where an energy issue has occurred and direct linemen to a specific location. This removes guesswork and improves restoration time. |
Linemen physically operate grid equipment to restore sections of the grid until the problem is fixed and all power can be restored. | Intelligent devices on the grid can minimize the number of customers impacted by an outage. |
Customers need to inform us of an outage. | The energy provider can send signals to smart meters to check if a customer's power is on or off. This reduces overall outage response times. |
Before smart grid | New smart grid capabilities |
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Energy grid operators rely on linemen and a limited number of alarms to know if there is trouble on an energy circuit. | Technologies such as line sensors, intelligent substations and communication devices provide real-time information on system health so that smart grid operators can prevent many energy issues before they happen. |
Energy grid operators use a limited amount of data to make decisions about reducing the load on the grid to make it operate more efficiently. | Digital smart grid management systems can analyze large amounts of data every second – including weather, wholesale energy costs and energy demand. This information then determines how the grid can be operated to maximize efficiencies. |