TXU to install digital electric meters !!!

TXU to install digital electric meters
Associated Press
Posted on Mon, Jan. 29, 2007

DALLAS - Utility meter readers may soon go the way of the milkman and typewriter salesmen.

Electricity-provider TXU will begin installing digital, automated meters in Dallas on Tuesday and plans to automate its entire system by 2011.

Crews for TXU Corp.'s electric-delivery unit will spend three weeks replacing conventional meters, followed by six to eight weeks of testing.

The new meters will be connected to the Internet through power lines, TXU said. Company officials say automation will cut the number of power failures and the time it takes to restore service after an outage because the meters can send and receive signals - alerting crews to potential problems.

"For 100 years we've sent electrons one-way down the wire. Now something will be coming back. This little box will call and tell us you're out" of power, Tom Baker, the chief executive of TXU's electric-delivery unit, said at the time.

TXU will be using a system called BPL, or broadband over power line to communicate with the meters. In October, TXU said it had agreed to buy 400,000 BPL-ready meters from an Indiana company for an undisclosed price.

TXU and privately held Current Communications Group LLC hope to sell Internet service over power lines to up to 2 million electricity customers in North Texas over the next several years. Consumers would get service by plugging a modem into a standard electrical outlet.

BPL faces technological and economic hurdles to becoming as commonplace as cable or phone-line Internet service. But members of the Federal Communications Commission who viewed the TXU house in Dallas last year were guardedly optimistic about the technology's potential to offer competition to cable and phone providers of Internet service.