Smart metering and demand response continue to increase in US

FERC’s annual smart metering and demand response assessment highlights annual increases averaging around 8 million new smart meters.

The assessment, compiled as a statutory requirement annually, quotes 2021 smart meter data as the latest, with numbers of 111.2 and 115.3 million smart meters from the EIA and Institute for Electric Innovation respectively.

These correspond to respective penetrations of 68.3% and 70.8%, based on a total of 162.8 million metering endpoints in the US.

That year also was the fifth consecutive year that the number of advanced meters has increased by approximately 8 million.

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In that year also for the first time the penetration in each of the customer classes rose over 60%, reaching 68.7% for the residential, 65.6% for the commercial and 63.2% for the industrial classes.

The data also is broken down by census division with the highest penetration of 86.2% recorded in the West South Central division, i.e. Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Other divisions with penetrations exceeding 70% were the East North and East South Central, Pacific and South Atlantic – this latter experiencing the largest increase in smart meters in the year with utilities including Virginia Electric & Power, Duke Energy Florida and Appalachian Power reporting just over 2 million more meters or 9%.

Conversely the lowest penetration, just 23.1%, was recorded in New England, which includes the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, while the Middle Atlantic, including New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, was at 40.7%.

Overall the West North Central division recorded the largest percentage increase of 14%, allbeit from a low base, with utilities reporting approximately 770,000 more smart meters.

The Institute for Electric Innovation has most recently projected 128 million smart meters to be installed in the US by the end of 2023 with the penetration approaching 80%.

Demand response assessment

The assessment finds that from 2021 to 2022, the demand response resource capacity in US wholesale markets increased by approximately 817MW to a total of 32,920MW, representing a 2.5% increase.

Demand response resource totals increased from 2021 to 2022 in all but one of the wholesale markets. Despite this increase in the capacity of demand response participating, the percentage of peak demand that these resources represent fell slightly from 6.6% in 2021 to 6.5% in 2022 because the increase in peak demand outpaced the increase in demand response.

Utilities and system operators in certain parts of the country also are increasingly evaluating opportunities to use load flexibility, as facilitated by the deployment of customer-sited distributed energy resources and other energy management devices, to help address the needs of a system with a growing penetration of variable energy resources.

For example, California recently established a statewide goal to develop 7,000MW of load flexibility resources to reduce net peak electrical demand.

State regulators and utilities also continue to consider the advantages and disadvantages of different types of time-varying retail rates, especially in the context of integrating electric vehicles (EVs).