What matters: creating a smarter energy grid

St. Clairsville, Ohio, is a city with a long history of energy innovation. Over the past decade, they have received multiple recognitions for environmental stewardship and improvements to the city’s utility systems.

Today, St. Clairsville provides utility services to a population of over 5,000 people, operating approximately 3,000 electric and 2,400 water meter points. When city officials began looking for ways to increase operational efficiencies, improve service and provide new tools for customers to make better decisions about energy and water consumption, they turned to Eaton.

St. Clairsville hoped to build a two-way radio frequency (RF) network across its service territory to facilitate advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), demand response and distribution automation capabilities—defining elements of an innovative smart grid network.

“We realized very few vendors could offer a comprehensive system that met our goals for both electric and water monitoring,” said Dennis Bigler, service director for the City of St. Clairsville. “However, the largest selling point was the implementation support Eaton was able to provide, which would help make the system-wide upgrades as painless as possible for our staff and residents.”

Eaton engineers recommended a self-configuring, self-healing, self-managing RF mesh network that would provide bi-directional connectivity to intelligent endpoints and the utility’s central back office. Not only would this enable real-time support for utility meters, load control switches and distribution automation controls all on one network—each new meter would be a point of communication between customers and the city. This meant gaining accurate, real-time consumption data, outage information and system engineering data.

Tying it all together was Eaton’s powerful AMI software. The innovative, flexible and intelligent platform handles real-time data acquisition, logging and management. With Eaton's Yukon AMI software module, the city is able to improve billing accuracy, quickly identify outages or unusual usage patterns, monitor voltage conditions in real-time and process AMI data for both day-to-day and long-term analysis.