Consultant previews AMI benefits and data considerations; deployment tied to billing upgrade

James King of TMG Consulting told the board AMI is "technology and it's an infrastructure to allow meters to talk two-way back to the data center," allowing far more frequent meter reads and new operational capabilities such as outage detection, leak alerts and improved field efficiency.

King said AMI raises the data cadence from a single monthly read to many data points per day (for example, 96 electric-meter samples per day), offers improved visibility for outage and load analysis, and enables future services including distributed energy and EV management. He emphasized the head-end software, meter-data management and enterprise integrations (CIS, SCADA, GIS) are central to realizing those benefits.

Staff cautioned that the AMI rollout is tied to a billing-system upgrade and estimated the earliest deployment is roughly two years out; because of that sequencing, final costs and an ordinance with fee schedules are not yet ready. King also noted vendors typically use strong encryption on communications and that most transmitted meter data are technical rather than personally identifying.

The board asked about data ownership and privacy. Staff said meter data are city data; King said transmissions are encrypted and that AMI systems must include governance and cybersecurity controls before deployment.