Status of the SmartChoice Advanced Metering System Implementation

Mr. Glenn Fisher is going to give us that presentation. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Glenn Fisher, director of Edmond Electric, wanted to give you a quick update on where we are with our SmartChoice program. First of all, this, what are we doing? What have we been doing? We currently or I should shouldn't say currently, but we in the past we had manual reads all our meetings, water and electric meters. We had field crews go out there, drive out to the neighborhoods, walk to neighborhoods, read them, write them down and get them into handhelds.

Upload that. And what we're just changing over to is a basically 900 megahertz radio system where the meters will actually communicate back to what we call the army heading that handy and gathers all of that data from all the different meters across the system, feeds that to a meter data management system, which then then validates that all the reads coming from the water and electric motors and then that meter data management system feeds all that information out to various platforms. Our billing system, our different operating platforms, gives our mass, etc., all of our different platforms. And I want to say this is probably one of the most complicated systems that the city has ever implemented. And I want to give thanks to the I.T. Staff and UCS staff have put in a lot of hours testing, validating, making sure everything is working correctly as we move forward.

So how did we get here? We started off this project. City council approved contracts with Lansing here back in October of 2019. We started work with lands here in early 2020 and immediately ran into the pandemic, which slowed it down quite a bit. And then we started, of course, all the supply chain issues. Slow this down, even more. We then moved into 2021 where we had a contract approved for the customer portal software. We did a contract with Utility Partners of America in October of 2023 to actually install the meters out in the field. They ramp that up in August of last year and we still have about 4000 water registers in about 1800 electric meters are still need to be installed. We haven't completed the installations because we've had supply chain issues. There's been a major delay in some of the these meters for some of our commercial accounts. So we're still moving forward with that. We've got a plan in place as we get those that we are using our electric staff and the field services staff to install those meters. We don't know the schedule yet. We're working out that plan right now, but we're getting deliveries out of those currently.

So where are we now? Currently, we have as I mentioned, we were using the old manual reads currently out of 44,000 accounts. We have 39,000 of those accounts using the AMI system for billing. We are actually moving that information back into the system and we've been using that for monthly billing. That's 60, that's almost 68,000 meters altogether electric and water So we've been moving those over book by book starting in November of last year. So that's another thing that IT and UCS has been working very diligently on is making sure all of those reads are accurate. Comparing those to manual reads before we go live with that. So they've been slowly moving those over. So we're we're we're getting close. So some final things that we need to do. We've got an upgrade to the CIS system that IT is working on.

We've got some firmware out there for our gateways and routers on our communication system out in the field. It's being updated. We've got the customer portal platform that we're we're looking to go live on soon. There's that's in final acceptance testing right now. It is working on that. And we've also got the update to the campus our meter data management system software. We keep these all updated as we go forward. As there's new versions coming out, they test each of those versions against all the different things that have to happen. So those are some of the final to dos.

And so with that, we are looking to go live on the portal between April 8th and 24. So we are closing in on that. The reason I have the date in there, the time frame is because those little punch list things that I just mentioned, we've got to make sure all those are done before we get to that final go live. So if you are current eCity Express, which is what we're using now for our customer communication online. You should have already seen an email that basically said, Hey, this is coming. You're going have to reregister. Sorry about that. But it is a new portal. It will require registration. Again, make sure you have your account number for you. Try that. It let you know that the your monthly billing information will still be available. It talks about there's there is a fact page you can go to and if you have any payment options like levelized billing anything like that autopay set up, all of that transforms over to the new portal.

Nothing will change for you what you do get. we're going to continue outreach through a whole bunch of different platforms. Social media. We've got some videos coming out about using the portal, how it works. We're using digital banners. We're looking at some geofencing ads through Cox so that we can promote this internal to city, to the city. So I'll go out and speak. If anybody wants to hear me rattle on about am I, I will be more than happy to come out to whatever organization and speak to you about it and where we are. And so finally, I wanted to give you some screenshots about what you'll see. We've talked about this for a long time, about what the customers are going to get out of this. This is basically currently what you see is a monthly billing. This is this is just the monthly billing that you'd see in your statement. You'll still be able to see that. You'll be able to drill down even further and you go in and say, okay, show me what happened in that last billing cycle.

What were the daily reads like? What did I do every day? So if you have a high day and you want to click on see that one with the highest bar, if you want to know what happened throughout that day, you can go into the hourly rates and you can see how you use energy in each hour of the day. Same thing with your water. You can still see your monthly billing.

You can go in and look at your daily water usage to see what you use each day. And you can go in and see the hourly rates on your water. And one of the benefits of this is that you can go in and say, okay, I've got that high peak right now, what can I do? Well, if you're looking at the previous day's usage, you can typically remember what I did yesterday. Did I turn my sprinklers on and let them on? Did I let a hose run accidentally for a long time? And the other advantage of this is I can go in and say, okay, if I want to change my metering cycle or my watering cycle, say I have it at 5 minutes, I want to move to 3 minutes, you'll be able to actually see what improvements that makes, how much less water use.

Same thing with electric. You'll be able to see that hourly usage. You know, if I turn my have my stove going with my wash machine running and my dryer going and everything going, you can tell how that's affecting your energy usage. So it's a good tool for the customer to be able to look at how they're using electric and water, be able to control that usage, and there will be additional things that we roll out in the future. Programs, services associated with this. This is just the first step to get this information out to the customers, and we plan to improve on that going forward.

So with that, any questions? No council, any questions? I'm glad that we're continuing the rollout. We know it's been a tedious process, but we're getting there. We're close. It was exciting. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you..

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