Albany Utilities: AMI rollout 88% complete; remaining 12% pose access, safety and cost challenges

At an April 10 meeting of the Albany Utility Board, utilities staff reported that the city’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) rollout is about 88% complete, with 78,720 of a revised total 89,831 meters exchanged and about 11,111 remaining.

Kendall Hodge, utilities staff, told the board: "So on the slide before you, what we have here is, our project completion rate. So in in total, we have 89,831, meters, to be exchanged. So far, we've exchanged 78,720. And we have about a little over 11,000, remaining." Hodge said the earlier figure of 91,947 meters was reduced after staff scrubbed accounts and removed inactive or apparently abandoned meters.

Why it matters: the remaining exchanges are concentrated in cases that require additional field work, customer cooperation or repairs to homeowner-owned meter cabinets. Those conditions increase project cost, slow deployment and affect billing accuracy and water-loss accounting, staff said.

Hodge provided a commodity breakdown: water accounts total 38,861, with 32,718 exchanged (about 84%); a middle commodity listed in the presentation had 16,165 accounts with 13,671 exchanged (about 85%); and electric accounts totaled 34,805 with 32,331 exchanged (about 93%). For water specifically Hodge said 6,143 water meters remain; about 3,700 of those will be handled by an outside contractor (listed in the presentation as H2O); the remaining water exchanges will be performed by Albany Utilities, including larger commercial meters that were always city responsibility.

Hodge described common obstacles for the remaining exchanges: material-condition problems…