Portland General Electric has been named the first recipient of the Utilimetrics AMI/Smart Grid Award.

“This prestigious new award honors a utility that demonstrates superior achievement in innovation,” said Rick Stevens, Utilimetrics past chairman of the board.” We received many impressive entries from utilities whose AMI/smart grid projects are under way.”

PGE completed installation of a system-wide wireless smart metering project consisting of 827,000 end points and featuring a series of business process automations that will produce $18.2 million U.S. annually in operating savings.

PGE’s new system is a two-way wireless fixed network. It features 46 collectors positioned throughout a 4,000-square-mile service territory.

By Sept. 1 PGE rolled nearly 700,000 meters over to network reads and was successfully capturing nearly 100% of the required daily billing reads. PGE scaled up the company’s meter data management system to handle register reads from 1.2 million meters, interval data from 100,000 meters and storage for up to 7 terabytes of validated meter data.

“PGE is a wonderful example to all utilities engaged in AMI deployment,” Stevens said.