HECO tests smart electric meters

From this morning’s Hon­olulu Adver­tiser: Hawai­ian Elec­tric is shift­ing its atten­tion away from BPL (broad­band Inter­net over power lines) to a more spe­cific project: smart elec­tric meters.

The test­ing site is appro­pri­ate: 3000 homes in the Ocean Pointe sub­di­vi­sion of Ewa Beach (Google map). Smart meters can do meter read­ings on their own, sav­ing HECO employ­ees from nav­i­gat­ing Ewa’s ridicu­lous traf­fic snarl. These meters can also pro­vide real-time mon­i­tor­ing of line qual­ity and ser­vice issues. These fea­tures, if prop­erly inte­grated with HECO’s mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems and imple­mented through­out the island, might give HECO much bet­ter infor­ma­tion dur­ing peak loads and disasters.

BPL deliv­ers the Inter­net through elec­tri­cal outlets

BPL pro­vides Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity through exist­ing power lines. Con­sumers could rent or pur­chase a BPL modem, plug it into an AC out­let, and get a broad­band con­nec­tion. For main­land US elec­tric util­i­ties, BPL is a rare oppor­tu­nity to improve oper­at­ing effi­ciency and cre­ate new busi­nesses that relate directly to their core ser­vices. BPL Today claims the BPL mar­ket could be a US$200M indus­try. There are grow­ing indi­ca­tions that BPL will be a key suc­cess fac­tor (KSF) for the US elec­tric util­ity indus­try within the next 5 years.

If HECO had been suc­cess­ful with a BPL con­sumer Inter­net ser­vice, the com­pany could have been a for­mi­da­ble com­pet­i­tive rival to Time Warner Oceanic and Hawai­ian Tel­com in the Oahu broad­band mar­ket. My June 7th post dis­cussed how the TimeWarner-HawTel rivalry is focus­ing on basic issues like ser­vice speed.

HECO’s change in plans isn’t a big sur­prise. They were test­ing BPL Inter­net ser­vice with a dozen cus­tomers in the McCully area, so sus­pend­ing that project only affected a few cus­tomers. BPL imple­men­ta­tions in the US are usu­ally expen­sive affairs, but the large num­ber of mul­tires­i­dent build­ings on Oahu might give HECO a chance to roll out BPL with­out restruc­tur­ing their elec­tri­cal dis­tr­bu­tion sys­tem or buy­ing extra repeaters.

CrunchGear and Reuters reported on May 15 that DirecTV is con­sid­er­ing a BPL pilot project in a large main­land US city, and rolling out a WiMax service.

Tagged as: Hawaiian-Telcom, HECO, Internet, key-success-factors, ksf, Oahu, telecom, Time-Warner-Cable, USA