HEATHSVILLE—In an effort to learn more about Dominion Energy’s new smart meters being installed at homes across the Northern Neck, Northumberland supervisors on Thursday, April 4, invited a team of deployment managers and engineers to explain why the meters are needed, what the advantages are and how much it will cost Dominion customers.
According to Dominion project manager Patrick Slayton, the technology behind smart meters is not new. “Our peer utilities all have this technology,” he said, citing 58 other investor-owned electric companies across the U.S. being fully deployed with the meters.
“The Edison Electric Institute (they do reporting for the industry across the U.S.) reported in 2020 that 107 million smart meters were deployed. All that is to say we are not a proving ground here, we’re just coming up to what our peers are already doing,” said Slayton.
From 2012-2015, Dominion ran pilot programs in Alexandria, Charlottesville, Midlothian, Williamsburg and Blue Ridge. In 2018, the General Assembly passed the Grid Transformation and Security Act, part of which declared grid transformation projects, which include advanced metering, to be in the public interest. Dominion received State Corporation Commission approval for the meters in 2022. Slayton said 91% of Dominion customers in the state have the new meters installed, with about 200 remaining in the Northern Neck.
Slayton said the meters enable….
