Advantages of Having a Smart Meter

Posted on November 18, 2019 by Tracy Vreeland

Santee Cooper is in the process of changing over meters to smart meters or Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) meters. AMI meters are able to send your usage right to the electric utility rather than have a person check it, record it and bring those numbers back to us.

As you can imagine, this will save a lot of time and commitment of personnel. But there are other advantages.

You, the customer, will have access to your usage information. That gives you the power to decide if you want to lower or raise your thermostat, run your appliances at different times or just change the way you use power. This could reduce your usage and therefore, your bill.

It will also help us identify and respond to outages faster and more efficiently. We’ll know when there’s an outage without a customer phone call, where it is and how many people are affected. This allows us to respond appropriately. That can help get your power on quicker and save us time and resources.

Here at Santee Cooper, we’ve been progressively upgrading meters. But our new business forecast plan accelerates the rollout of smart meters to customers and develops a new energy management program to help you use new technologies to better manage your own energy use.

In the meantime, you can find more information on saving energy on our website.