Smart Meter Deployment Projected to Reach 107 Million As of Year-End 2020

The Institute for Electric Innovation (IEI) released its “Electric Company Smart Meter Deployments: Foundation for a Smart Grid” report, which projects that U.S. electric companies have installed 98 million smart meters as of year-end 2019, covering more than 70 percent of all U.S. households. The report also projects the total number of installed smart meters will rise to 107 million by the end of 2020. 

“As the electric power industry continues its transition to a cleaner energy future, modernizing the energy grid remains at the forefront of the industry’s priorities,” said IEI Executive Director Lisa Wood. “Smart meters are foundational for two-way communication and data exchange between electric companies and their customers. By investing in and deploying smart meters, electric companies are enhancing the resilience and operations of the energy grid and gaining more detailed visibility into system operations, which helps companies to restore power more quickly or avoid outages altogether in some cases.”

In addition to highlighting the increase in smart meter deployment in the United States, this report also explains how the technology associated with smart meters provides benefits to customers. Smart meters:

• Provide a digital link between electric companies and their customers and serve as the backbone for new and expanded customer services, such as device-level home energy insights, outage notifications, and bill alerts.  
• Support budget-setting tools and alerts that notify customers about their bills on an ongoing basis.
• Enable electric companies to offer new pricing options to customers to incent load shifting and energy management, and to align usage with clean energy production.