Analyst Insight: Smart Meters Case Studies 2Q24

An electric meter was originally designed to provide utilities with a simple number the amount of electric current that flowed through the meter each month. The first significant technological evolution to electric meters came with the rise of first-generation smart meters and the transition from analog devices to basic digital technologies. For this report, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) encompasses smart meter hardware, software, and communications technologies.

With the development of more sophisticated hardware and the miniaturization of computing power, second-generation smart meters have leapfrogged traditional definitions and now encompass connected networks of intelligent edge-computing devices, fully equipped with onboard sensors, computers, and communications capabilities. Now, these devices can also measure the full waveforms of current and voltage and then, capture these measurements at sub-second intervals.

However, the sector still has a fair degree of technological differentiation. In this report, second-generation or next-generation AMI constitutes these baseline enhancements, while AMI 2.0 is reserved for the continuous sampling of ultrahigh resolution data, at a minimum of 15 kHz, across all smart meters, significant local processing, and real-time networking functionalities requirements that some devices labeled as AMI 2.0 meet to varying degrees. These technological enhancements offer a glimpse into the innovative case studies highlighted throughout this report.