Hutto residents are next in line in Williamson County to have their electricity meters changed over to the new smart meters and officials say the change will be an easy one with little disruption.

“The good thing about these meters is the people that don’t want to get involved in the technology don’t have to, but for those that do want to, there is a world of information that will now be right at their fingertips,” Eddie Ferguson with Oncor said. “Once they are changed, the only difference customers will notice is we don’t have to come out to read their meters anymore.”

The new digital technology will benefit both electricity consumers and providers through gathering and outputting more information about electricity usage, peak usage hours and power outages. The switch is expected to be completed in Williamson County by the end of May, and will change more 100,000 meters in the county. Across the state, 3.4 million meters will be changed.

In the coming weeks, residents will get a door hanger at their home explaining the change and when technicians will be out.

Using real-time information, service providers can monitor peak usage hours, when electricity is the most expensive. Ferguson said that with that information providers may be able to offer new time-of-use pricing plans that allow consumers to schedule their electricity usage hours throughout the day to save money. He also expects appliances to have built in timers to allow homeowners the ability to have more control over their use.
“Having been in state affairs, I can see that this change is giving our consumers an awareness and education process that will help them save money and be more efficient,” Hutto’s State Representative Diana Maldonado said. “As a consumer, I can now better use my appliances at home. We’ve just never thought about how we use electricity, and this new equipment will do that.”

Real time monitors will be available at Lowe’s and through electric retail providers. The monitors will allow customers to see exactly how much energy they are using in their own home.

Ferguson said customers shouldn’t worry about recent glitches reported in the Killeen and Dallas area and said any customer that wants to check if their electricity is being read correctly can.

“Anyone who wants a meter tested, we will test it,” he said. “In East Dallas we field tested over 4,000 meters and there wasn’t a problem with one. But we want customers to know it is working correctly so we will check them out if needed.”

There will be dual meters at a number of homes in Hutto to make sure the meters are reading correctly. Once field tests show there are no problems, all old meters will be removed.

“This really is a new way of thinking,” Maldonado said. “We do, however, want to ensure customers see minimal disruption in installation.

According to the Public Utility Commission Director of Governmental Relations Casey Haney, Oncor is prepared to deal with mistakes and to work with customers should there be problems with the new meters, Haney said.

“Oncor filed with us a week or two ago that they discovered through their own internal audit process that when the meters were deployed, in less than 1 percent of the new meters, when the reader went out to take the old meter off, it was misread,” Haney said.

According to Oncor Area Manager Eddie Ferguson, the discrepancies took place in the Temple area, and was a result of “human error,” where readers simply didn’t write the correct number down taken from the old meters. Now, the provider is requiring their employees to take photographs of the old meters during each switch-out to minimize errors.

The change comes as a result of 2005 federal legislation mandating that all states urge electricity providers to investigate smart grid technology and 2007 legislation stating providers should begin deploying the new technology.