Lee County Electric Cooperative (LCEC), a North Fort Myers, Florida based utility company has selected ENERGYprism® Customer Care and Energy Vision® Operational Efficiency solutions from Aclara® to transform its Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) into a foundation for smart-grid development [1, 2, 3]. LCEC has been in the process of collecting daily electricity consumption data from its 210,000 consumers through the Aclara Two-Way Automatic Communications System technology, a fixed-network AMI that transmits meter readings over power lines since 2002 [1, 2, 4].
Smart grid technologies implemented in LCEC service area include [5]: a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI), GIS mapping, outage management system, and other advanced system communication capabilities. According to [5], LCEC also coverts existing relays to smart relays. Smart relays provide LCEC with advanced line protection capabilities, which help address the growing complexity of its distribution system that includes the interconnection of consumer-owned renewable distributed generation.
