KAPLOWITZ & GALEF HOLD PRESS CONFERENCE TO INTRODUCE STATE BILL IN SUPPORT OF “SMART” ELECTRIC METERS
For Immediate Release: June 15, 2007
Contact: Michael B. Kaplowitz, (914) 995-2848 or (914) 924-3404 cell
WHITE PLAINS, NY - Today at the offices of the Westchester County Legislature, NYS Assemblywoman Sandy Galef (D-Ossining), joined by long-time “Smart Meter” advocate Westchester County Legislator and chairman of the County Board’s Budget & Appropriations Committee Michael B. Kaplowitz (D,I,WF – Somers), held a press conference to introduce a state bill (A.8739) that, if passed, would enable Westchester residents to obtain a real-time pricing “Smart Meter”, which could potentially save residential customers up to 30% on their monthly electric bills, while also benefiting the environment.
“The bill would allow Westchester County to develop and implement a large scale (50,000 or more residential single family and multi-unit dwellings) pilot program to determine the degree consumers will benefit from real-time electric pricing (RTP) and real-time usage (RTU) through smart electric metering,” said Kaplowitz, the immediate past chair of the Legislature’s Environment & Energy Committee. “Consumers deserve choice. Smart Meters and real-time pricing would not only provide ratepayers with a choice, but would revolutionize electricity consumption by saving consumers real dollars and conserving energy, which, in turn helps prevent global warming. It’s up to the State Legislature to ensure that ratepayers in New York have the opportunity to obtain a “smart meter”. I want to thank Assemblywoman Galef for introducing this bill in the Assembly.”
Joining the two local lawmakers was Joe Littman, Regional Manager for the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA). “The time is now to begin moving toward reducing our energy consumption and costs,” stated Littman. “Prices of electricity due to increases in demand have risen dramatically over the last few years especially in NYC and the surrounding counties and Long Island. We have been looking at smart metering and RTP for a long time as a way of reducing demand and costs to ratepayers. These devices, if incorporated into utility filings for improvements to the infrastructure, could prove to be very valuable.”
Also in attendance lending their support for the bill were representatives from Riverkeeper, Sierra Club, Federated Conservationists of Westchester County (FCWC), and Citizens Campaign for the Environment.
According to Kaplowitz, since utilities like Con Ed and NYSEG no longer generate (or generate very little) electricity, they need to purchase the power to serve their customers from unregulated suppliers who have varying cost based upon the types of fuel they use to make electricity and the efficiency in which they produce it. Because the need for available power changes every hour so does the price. “It’s no different then any other commodity we use be it natural gas, oil or gasoline, when the demand is high prices increase and when demand is low and there is more power available prices go back down,” said Kaplowitz.
Kaplowitz noted that currently, utility customers pay an average of the low cost electricity they use at night and the much higher rates that occur during peak times of a day which typically is between the hours of 1pm and 6pm. If we are successful, consumers will benefit by paying much lower rates at night and early morning when the rates are actually lower and have real time information so that they will know in advance what the cost of the electricity is at peak times in order to determine whether or not they want to iron their clothes now or wait until the cost is much lower, thereby benefiting twice.
“Under the current system you pay an average of the various prices of a watt for each of the 24 hours. What we want is to have consumers benefit from the lower, off-peak rates that keep that average down during the day and have the information available to them so they can make choices when the rates are high. That’s the benefit of RTP,” Kaplowitz said.
The legislation would make it mandatory that as utilities begin to replace old and outdated electric meters, the new meters they install will need to be equipped with cheap and available communication technology that will allow energy management and energy service companies the access to meter data and the ability to transmit pricing information to the utility customers. In the demonstration today a device known as the POWER (Protecting Our Worlds Energy Resources) box was used to accomplish this. The POWER box, which looks like a small touchscreen computer, had a set of bar graphs - one depicting a homeowner’s usage and the other the cost. As various devices (lights, hairdryer etc.) were plugged in and turned on, the usage went up accordingly on the graph. As the price changed according to recent rates provided by the Independent System Operator (the NYS agency that reports the cost power each hour throughout the day) the graph fluctuated as well.
“Real time pricing is not new to NYS, in September 2005 the NYS Public Service Commission issued an order mandating RTP for the largest full service customers of the 6 regulated utilities statewide but at the time they were not ready to allow the residential customers access even on a voluntary basis partly because the utilities did not have the infrastructure in place to support it. Now however utilities are requesting permission to move forward with these much needed improvements but the PSC has still not approved any of their proposals. That is why we need action by the state legislature,“ concluded Kaplowitz.
