Why do we need new meters?
Given that 50% of existing electricity meters in Québec are coming to the end of their service lives, Hydro-Québec went looking for a new platform that would increase metering efficiency and ensure asset sustainability. Based on these considerations, the company opted for an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) requiring the installation of 3.8 million next-generation meters that can be read remotely.
The AMI provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for handling electricity use data from the customer's meter to Hydro-Québec's billing system. This evolvable infrastructure ensures meter reliability, data security and full compatibility of all components. It also meets international standards and is designed to support smart grid applications.
Benefits to customers
- Billing based on actual electricity use data.
- Exact reading of meter data when you move, doing away with the need to fill in a meter-reading card.
- Automatic remote meter reading less intrusive than home visits.
- Remote outage detection and service restoration.
- 1,600 tons of CO2 emissions avoided each year, with some 400 fewer vehicles on the road.
How data is sent from the meter to the billing system
- Each meter will play an active role by recording customer electricity use and transmitting the data to another meter, which in turn will transmit it to another, and so on, until it gets to a router.
- The router will send the data to another router or directly to a data collector.
- The collector will forward the data to the head-end system. From there, the data will be sent on to the meter data management system (MDMS), a huge data warehouse connected to Hydro-Québec's billing system.
