Trinidad & Tobago Electricity to Automate 400,000 Meters with Itron Fixed-Network Technology

Trinidad & Tobago Electricity Commission has contracted Itron to deliver an advanced metering system. The deployment is expected to fundamentally transform the way the utility conducts business and serves its customers, said Doug Staker, vice president of the Itron International Group.

Trinidad and Tobago is a twin island republic located in the southern Caribbean, just off the coast of Venezuela. Its electricity company, T&TEC, will install 400,000 high-powered, solid-state CENTRON meters over 20 months as part of a fixed network system. T&TEC will be able to remotely read customers’ meters, thereby eliminating the need for access to private property by meter readers. Additionally, Itron’s technology will ensure that customers’ bills will be based strictly on accurate, actual reads rather than estimations. The system will also enable the utility to perform unscheduled on-demand reads and collect interval data to support “time-of-use” billings in the future.

Itron’s advanced metering system provides positive outage and restoration notification, which will improve outage management and service to T&TEC’s customers. The utility will receive immediate notification of interruptions to electricity service in any specific area to facilitate faster restoration. T&TEC is implementing Itron’s Revenue Protection Suite, an analytic software tool that enables the utility to identify likely instances of meter tampering on a near real-time basis to detect and deter energy theft.