CenterPoint Energy wins international smart grid award

The Houston-based CenterPoint Energy, Inc., a leader in integrating smart grid technology to achieve more reliable electricity service for its customers, won an international award this month for its electric grid efforts.

CenterPoint was awarded the International Smart Grid Action Network Award of Excellence and the Global Smart Grid Federation Best Smart Grid Project for 2016.

CenterPoint, having developed its smart grid systems over the past 10 years, has won praise for making the electric grid more reliable, affordable and secure, while reducing power outages and eliminating millions of dollars in fees for its customers.

“We’re taking intelligent data from the grid, bringing it to the back office, and then we’re creating applications to allow us to do some things more intelligently to get power on faster, to restore service more efficiently and more accurately,” Kenny Mercado, senior vice president of CenterPoint Energy’s electric operations, said in an interview with Daily Energy Insider.

CenterPoint finished rolling out smart meters for its 3.4 million gas customers and 2.4 million electric customers in 2015. It plans to continue expanding its metering and intelligent grid systems over time.

“The biggest driver of that metering technology was to bring meter reading data back to the operating competitive energy market,” Mercado said.

Meter readings that occurred 50 days late were historically used to determine how much wholesale supply was needed to serve the market. CenterPoint’s smart meter technology, however, provides 96 data points per day per meter, allowing millions of data points to be sent to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the independent system operator for the region.

Mercado said that the metering technology has provided a win-win situation for the utility, its customers and the marketplace.

“We’re saving on truck rolls, we’re saving millions of gallons of gas, we’re cleaning the air and we’re providing tremendous customer service,” Mercado said.

The smart meters, and applications like CenterPoint’s Power Alert Service, have improved customer satisfaction tremendously, Mercado said. The Power Alert Service sends free email, text and phone notifications to customers when their power goes out, gives them an estimated time for repairs, and tells them when power has been restored.

CenterPoint is also generating even more “digital intelligence” so that it can create new applications to enhance the service it provides customers, Mercado said.

CenterPoint plans to open a customer preference center next year to better serve the needs of its electric and gas customers as they navigate a competitive marketplace with more energy choices. The new center will provide CenterPoint with more data on the different needs of various categories of customers – small residential, large commercial and industrial.

CenterPoint hopes to achieve a better understanding of the support its various customers across six states have for cleaner, sustainable energy solutions. CenterPoint serves more than five million metered customers, primarily in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas.

“We are trying to create a digital environment where we are learning what your preferences are and in the future we can become your trusted adviser as you start thinking about more complex questions about what you should do with all of these options,” Mercado said.

That is important, Mercado said, because he foresees electric retail choice growing faster in Texas than anywhere else.

“We’re trying to equip ourselves with the right technology so that our operations system, our metering system, and our customer system can all work collaboratively to meet the preferences of the customer,” Mercado said. “We think making investments in our customer relationships is the next step.”