Austin Water selects Aclara AMI for landmark water project
ST. LOUIS -- Austin Water has selected Aclara, a leading supplier of smart infrastructure solutions (SIS) to electric, gas and water utilities around the world, to supply and implement a landmark advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) program to the utility, which services over 1 million people across more than 548 square miles in the Austin, Texas metropolitan area.
“Austin Water is excited to be working with the Aclara team to help us achieve our goal to bring advanced water metering technology to the City of Austin,” said Chris Stewart, chief information officer, Austin Water, which has been providing safe, reliable, high quality, sustainable and affordable water services for over 100 years.
Aclara will supply and implement a fully integrated end-to-end solution that will replace Austin Water’s current meters and manual meter reading system. The new AMI network will cover three counties in the greater Austin area and will comprise approximately 265,000 residential and commercial meters equipped with Aclara meter transmission units.
The AMI infrastructure will be built on the Aclara RF™ network technology, which provides redundant, reliable and high-performance two-way communications between data collectors and endpoints. In addition, Austin Water elected to deploy the Aclara Owned Network managed service solution.
The managed service solution consists of a network as a service (NaaS) offering to design, install and operate the city’s communication network, as well as a software as a service (SaaS) offering to manage, maintain and analyze its network and AMI data. For the SaaS solution, the system will operate on the foundation of the AclaraONE® (One Network for Everyone) fully hosted software platform that will equip Austin Water with powerful data, analytics and tools to optimize network operations and better serve its customers.
The AMI deployment will be rolled out by Aclara’s Smart Grid Solutions field services team utilizing the ProField® enterprise planning, workforce and asset management software to efficiently execute the deployment.
“We applaud Austin Water for its forward-thinking approach. This solution will leverage our technology strengths and experience. It will also help them realize their vision to enhance smart utility operations and be service-centric, enabling them to optimize their distribution system, improve billing, take advantage of predictive asset management, and engage their customers,” said Kumi Premathilake, division vice president, AMI and Services, Hubbell Utility Solutions.
