| Navajo Tribal Utility Authority Deploys Elster AMI Solution |
| Elster says that the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA), a nonprofit enterprise that supplies water, natural gas, wastewater and solar power services to the Navajo Nation and neighboring communities, will utilize its U.S. Department of Energy Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) to deploy Elster's EnergyAxis advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) smart grid solution. This represents Elster's second U.S. deployment of a single AMI head-end system and smart meters across electric, gas and water services. All SGIG funds are being utilized by NTUA for the AMI deployment. |
| According to Elster, this smart grid project will allow NTUA to improve customer service and reliability, as well as provide more accurate billing, to the 26,000 square-mile Navajo Nation, which spans northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico and southeastern Utah. In addition, Elster's two-way EnergyAxis communication system will enable NTUA to conduct remote data collection and connect/disconnect with substantially fewer personnel field visits and vehicle emissions, as well as offer improvements to its outage response and management process, Elster notes. For this project, router radios operating in a private 900 MHz spectrum are being used with hardened routers for gatekeeper communication and data gathering across the extremely rural and widespread service territory. In addition, OSIsoft LLC has been selected to provide its OSIsoft MDUS product for meter data capture and historical repository storage sent from the EnergyAxis head-end. SOURCE: Elster |
