Suwannee Valley EC Kicks Off AMI Project

NRTC and Itron representatives gathered last week in the offices of Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative, Live Oak, FL, to kick off a major advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) project. The multi-year deployment will eventually link about 28,500 electric meters, including more than 27,000 rural residences. The service area of about 2,100 square miles will include the Florida counties of Columbia, Hamilton, Lafayette and Suwannee.

In addition to meter data collection, SVEC is building lighting automation into the system using Itron’s Streetlight.Vision (SLV) technology. “SVEC has a quantity of Network Lighting Controllers (NLC). They will have the ability to map and control the NLCs from the SLV application,” said Chad Dose, NRTC’s AMI solutions director. “This will allow SVEC to automate the service and support of the area lights across their membership.”

Trevor Touchton, SVEC’s power system engineer (pictured third from the left) is leading the project for the cooperative. Others present at the kick-off meeting included (left to right) Cate Immenschuh, senior project manager, NRTC; Bill Shanahan, operations manager, NRTC; Kelli McKinley, member accounts team leader, SVEC; John Robinson, supervisor of metering and IT, SVEC; Alberto Salizar, project manager, Itron; Brent Cothern, IT manager, SVEC, and Kurt Miller, manager of engineering, SVEC.