Delivering Better Service with Smart Meters

Smart meters are a tool for more choice, convenience, and control. In the future, we hope you can make informed choices about how and when you use water and electricity in your home or business by reviewing detailed usage data and setting up usage alerts to better control your bill. 

They will also allow EWEB to offer flexible pricing plans to match customer budgets, lifestyles, and needs. And as systems are developed, we will also be able to provide new payment solutions that give customers more choice over how and when to pay bills.

These products and services will be developed in the coming years. We will let you know more about products and services as they are developed.

A power grid and water distribution network is what makes it possible to deliver electricity and water to your home or business. The system of power lines, substations and transformers provides on-demand power to you for everyday use. Likewise with a water distribution system and the network of reservoirs, pump stations and water mains.

A lot has changed since EWEB first began providing the community with electricity and water over 100 years ago. We are working on modernizing our power grid and water distribution system to create more resilient and efficient systems, which will help our community respond and recover in the event of a disaster. A part of this initiative is replacing the meters at the homes and businesses we serve with new smart meters.  

Smart meters will give EWEB greater visibility into the system, allowing us to pinpoint outage locations and enabling repair crews to restore services faster and at lower cost.

EWEB has a long history of conservation and environmental stewardship, and we are fortunate to have one of the cleanest power portfolios in the nation, with almost no electricity sourced from fossil fuels. 

Consistent with the values of our customer-owners, we're always looking to innovate, improve and further reduce our impact on the environment. Smart meters and the smart grid can reduce emissions of climate-disrupting greenhouse gases by:

• Reducing fleet needs
  Remote meter reading reduces the number of vehicles and trucks we have on the roads, which in turn helps reduce carbon emissions.  
  
  
• Supporting energy efficiency
  One of the most effective ways to reduce carbon emissions is to use less electricity. Smart meters offer a platform for us to provide you with future energy and cost saving programs. 
  
  
• Synchronizing energy supply and demand
  Technologies in smart meters make it possible for utilities and customers to avoid energy peaks, reducing use of older, less efficient power plants that typically have higher greenhouse gas emissions.  
  
  
• Integrating more renewable energy
  With improved management of electricity on the grid, more renewable energy sources, including customer-sited sources, can feed into the local and regional grid.  
  
  
• Supporting adoption of electric vehicles
  Smart meter and smart grid functionality can help ensure EVs are charged during periods of off-peak power demand, when costs are at their lowest. The ability to smooth out peaks and valleys in power demand can help drive down overall costs and carbon emissions across the energy system.

The ability to synchronize our power supply with customer demand will help keep generation and distribution costs down. Smart meters help us better project how much power we need at any given time so we can make infrastructure and power supply investments that align with our affordability initiative.