373,000 smart meter programme launched by Snohomish PUD

Snohomish County Public Utility District (PUD) has launched its 373,000 electricity and water smart meter upgrade to take place over the next three years.

The ‘Connect Up’ programme of Snohomish PUD, one of 28 PUDs in the state of Washington in the Pacific Northwest of the US, is expected to see the upgrading of approximately 350,000 electricity meters and 23,000 water meters with smart meters.

The programme began in August and is slowly ramping up as meter readers, customer service field reps and metermen gain experience in the different conditions in the field to enable them to safely perform the meter exchanges.

“There is a lot of planning and even more people power to build a department from the ground up,” says Mitch van Wegen, meter deployment superintendent, who is leading the electricity meter deployment team.

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Smart meters have been in the sights of Snohomish PUD since the late 2000s but they have only become cost-beneficial as the costs of the infrastructure and technology have reduced.

The current programme has been putting in place the infrastructure since 2019 with a brief postponement in that period due to supply chain issues.

The deployment started in the Bothell-Mill Creek area in the southwest of Snohomish County and broadly will run from urban to rural and south to north.

Benefits anticipated from the smart meters include the provision of 15-minute consumption data for customers, flexible billing periods, elimination of estimated bills and same day meter service, while longer-term plans include outage detection and new rate designs, including special electric vehicle charging rates.

With the smart water meters, an additional key benefit expected is the rapid detection of leaks via unusual spikes in water usage.

Snohomish PUD, the largest of the PUDs in Washington and the twelfth largest publicly owned utility in terms of customers served in the US, regards the new smart meters as a significant step as it becomes a ‘utility of the future’.