Utilities for both cities plan to begin meeting with federal officials this week to finalize agreements on spending the grant money during the next three years. Utility officials said they expect to go for all of the $20 million awarded to them because they had already planned to put up the required amount of money themselves.
“Generally speaking, I would expect us to get most if not all of the $20 million because our overall expenditure over the course of the next three to five years will exceed $40 million,” said Glendale Water & Power General Manager Glenn Steiger.
He added that the electric component of the plan makes up a majority of the planned cost for Glendale’s smart-grid system. In July, the Glendale City Council unanimously approved a $28.5-million contract with Itron Inc. for the development of the smart-meter grid, and the purchase of about 88,000 electric and 34,000 water meters.
Burbank Water and Power had also already planned on spending about $40 million in the next three years, said General Manager Ron Davis.
“We already had a council action to approve this — grant or no grant,” he said.
In Glendale, the four-year program schedule will likely be condensed to three years, with customers able to expect new meters within the next two years as a result of the federal windfall, Steiger said.
While the new meters are the most visible component of the plans, Davis said the updated grids will allow for a “host of energy-efficiency programs.”
The smart grid and meters will eventually allow for pricing and other consumer incentives based on real-time usage and will allow the utilities to pinpoint outages on the spot.
“When outages occur, we will know about it immediately, and the system itself will start to restore power in seconds,” Steiger said. “It’s more of a self-healing system.”
