Privacy and security concerns of utility customers about advanced electric meters are being addressed by the city of Santa Clara's municipal electric utility prior to introducing advanced meters in 2011 and 2012.

Silicon Valley Power (SVP) says its SVP Meter Connect data security will be on a par with the encryption level of sensitive government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense.

“We share our customers' concern about both protecting their privacy and assuring security of electricity usage data,” said John Roukema, director of SVP. “We have a very high level of confidence in the advanced metering infrastructure and network technology that we are going to deploy in Santa Clara, starting with our business community in 2011 and at residences in 2012.”

SVP Meter Connect's advanced meters are manufactured in North Carolina by Elster Group, which has more than 4.5 million advanced meters successfully deployed worldwide. Tropos Networks and Elster together will provide the networking and infrastructure necessary to transmit encrypted information from the meters to SVP.

SVP Meter Connect also contracts with Milton Security Group to analyze and evaluate the privacy and security measures installed in the SVP Meter Connect program.

The wireless equipment and network installed for the SVP Meter Connect program will also provide residents with free outdoor access to public Wi-Fi. The public Wi-Fi data streams, or channels, are not encrypted by SVP and will be completely segregated from the highly encrypted and separate advanced meter data management system.

SVP's disclosure of its security measures comes as a customer survey (conducted by RKS Research) found that privacy was a concern, even though over two-thirds of SVP customers believe advanced meters are a “good idea.”

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