Get Smart - Smart metering is poised to replace the bulky energy hardware eating up valuable space in your developments.
by Chris Wood
Inconvenient or not, the evolution from the 1973 OPEC oil embargo to Carter’s energy crisis to brownouts and blackouts and the advent of the hybrid passenger vehicle leads to at least one irrefutable truth: Energy is on our minds.
Still, it wasn’t long ago that no one gave a passing thought to the energy needs of residential developments. Local utilities plopped in a bank of meters and checked them monthly for billing. Maintenance of interior boilers, gas lines, and electricity was left to Schneider-types with well-worn toolbelts. Multifamily residents and John Q. homeowners alike got a relatively innocuous bill in the mail, signed a check, slapped on a stamp, and that was that.
“For the longest time in real estate, developers never wanted to be in the utilities business,” explains Troy Hull, vice president of Colorado Springs, Colo.–based Energy Billing Systems, a utility management services provider for multifamily developers that specializes in the installation of gas, electric, and water submetering, as well as energy allocation equipment. “They’d have 200 apartments, and they’d want 200 electric meters, 200 gas meters, old Igor stroking the boiler in the basement, and the utilities to send all the bills to the residents. For years and years, that is the way it had been.”
In the past decade or so, all that changed. Today, raw energy distribution and its associated costs have come to the forefront of commercial and consumer consciousness.
Simultaneously, utility companies, looking at their own bottom lines, were opting out of the labor-intensive meter maid business. And developers, eager for salable square footage and lower material costs, were giving meter banks and their associated hardware a good, strong look. For multifamily and mixed-use markets in particular, master metering has offered some alleviation of those concerns. Emerging “smart meter” technologies and a consumer desire for anything remotely green, however, stand to make energy metering and billing not only paperless, but at the command and control of the end user. And that’s just fine with everyone involved.
FLIP OF THE SWITCH
Technically dubbed Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), smart metering uses two-way wireless signals to communicate price data downstream to consumers and usage data upstream to utility billing databases. In essence, a user interface can tell a renter or homeowner at any given time exactly how much the energy will cost should they choose to power up the dishwasher, run a vacuum, or chill out with the air conditioner blasting. Integrated into the structured wiring of the residential unit, a black box collects kilowatt-hour data for hourly transmission back to the utility company. At the end of the month, John Q. hits his account via the Internet, authorizes an electronic transfer, and walks away.
“Smart metering and the development of AMI technology will allow for the holy grail of electric conservation: metering passed through to the user that includes the real-time price signals that are present today in the eyes of power generators and utility companies,” says David Metcalfe, a partner specializing in energy practices at New York–based law firm Cullen & Dykman. “Although we’re not there yet, there are a number of utilities and industry trade groups working on the R&D to shake out the best of smart metering technology for that to happen.”
One such utility is Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO), which is expanding a smart metering pilot project launched in 2006 from 500 meters to 3,000 meters across the island of Oahu. “The initial pilot demonstrated that the [wireless] technology works well in Oahu’s physical environment of dense urban development with concrete and steel buildings, mountains, deep valleys with tropical foliage, and heavy radio traffic,” says Sharon Higa, HECO’s corporate communications representative.
“The expansion was driven by our interest in continuing to better understand the logistics of replacing a large number of meters and transitioning such customers to automatic billing,” she adds. In addition to twoway communication of utility pricing, the HECO system will eventually allow the utility to take virtual control of water heaters and thermostats in the event that critical loads stress the grid.
GETTING PLUGGED IN
Building product manufacturers, as well, are seeing an opportunity. By approaching smart metering as a way to bundle products and services, they can promote brand awareness with developers seeking one-stop-shopping solutions to the energy and security needs of their customers.
Such programs will launch this November at several Land Tejas developments in Texas and the Withers Preserve resort project in Myrtle Beach, S.C. GE will implement its “ecomagination” program, which features a GE SmartCommand “eco-dashboard” that integrates security, intercom audio, HVAC, and lighting systems into a single interface, providing users with real-time and historical feedback on electricity and water consumption.
“The eco-dashboard will [tell] the homeowner, ‘Your current energy savings is X amount and that translates to X amount of dollars saved,’” says Jim Paulson, global marketing leader for GE Security, who is intimately involved in the ecomagination rollout to developers. “So it’s allowing energy control and access to real-world savings as a vehicle for the homeowner to aggregate information and measure their savings.”
At Withers Preserve, the master planned, mixed-use redevelopment of the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, 60 single-family homes are being prepared for an initial ecomagination rollout, with the development’s condo projects next in line. “It’s really for the end user, to help them manage their energy and water a little bit better,” says Rick Ryan, president of Withers Preserve Management. “We endorse it as the right thing to do. With energy being such an unusual thing that we don’t know if it is going to run out or not, we all need to be more cognizant and pay attention to it.”
For developers, the main benefit of smart metering is that it educates and offers cost incentives to an already interested user for taking ownership of energy billing and metering. Deployment is also likely to be easy. In most cases, it requires a phone call to your local utility provider or to a third-party service provider like Energy Billing Systems or Sensus Metering Systems, which is working on the HECO pilot. “You have to get up and call the utility and avail yourself of the resources they offer,” Metcalfe says. “Every utility has a team that will come out and audit properties, from the smallest residential to the largest commercial and industrial customer, and suggest remedies.”
Ultimately, smart metering will offer a way to sell value-added metering down to the end user. The electric companies— which will bear the cost of the new equipment and installation— will pump in the energy and transmit pricing data, while the resident will adjust usage and provide electronic payment. All the developer needs to do is adopt the technology, market the amenity, and let the data pass through.
At the very least, experts suggest keeping pace with the competition. Hull says he’s beginning to see “moderate interest” in AMI smart metering among the residential bids he is competing on throughout the Western states. “I’m seeing it in a lot of new infill construction and a lot of mixed-use,” he says. “Smart metering is not even the thing of the future anymore—it is a reality.”
