Municipal utilities around the country are slowly adopting smart metering powered by cloud computing to gain visibility into consumption levels, to control costs and to encourage adoption of renewable energy sources. Those cities and counties that embrace the technology can see immense benefits, including improved citizen services, reduced spending and boosted efficiency.
“We’re seeing tentative expansion,” says Cooper Martin, director of sustainability and solutions for the National League of Cities. “Larger cities, cities with more customers, utilities with more customers — they’ve embraced it a little bit earlier.”
“They stand to gain information quicker. A lot of times, they can streamline the billing process, providing the utility in a more convenient and transparent way,” Martin says. “It enables cities to be more precise.”
MORE FROM STATETECH: Find out how smart cities gain efficiencies from traffic sensors.
South Bend Benefits from Having Sensors in the Sewers
In the case of water utilities, cloud- powered solutions can detect leaks early, sparing customers from inflated bills and preserving resources for the city.
In 2004, South Bend began working to deploy a series of 150 networked sensors, developed in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, throughout the city’s sewers. A telemetry unit collects sensor data every five minutes and transmits it to a cloud-based database; real-time analytics tools look at the state of the sewer and send alerts to city personnel if anything appears abnormal.
Suddenly, Horvath and his team could see what was happening underground. They could understand issues better and focus their maintenance efforts to predict and prevent problems. And they realized they could achieve equivalent environmental benefits to those dictated by the EPA decree at a fraction of the cost.