Silver Spring, Greenbox Go Back to Oklahoma

Oklahoma Gas & Electric on Tuesday named Silver Spring Networks and Greenbox Technology as partners on its smart grid plans – yet again.

Only this time, the utility plans to use the two for a full-scale deployment rather than a pilot project, as it did last year (see Smart Grid: Test Customers Give Thumbs Up).

And, of course, Silver Spring bought Greenbox last month, so the two will be working even more closely together, so to speak (see Silver Spring Swallows Greenbox).

The OG&E project announced Thursday calls for 42,000 smart meters from General Electric to be installed in Norman, Okla. Redwood City, Calif.-based Silver Spring will network the meters.

The project will also seek to recruit 2,000 to 3,000 customers to get "almost real time" information about their in-home energy use and electricity pricing.

That's similar to the pilot project Silver Spring and Greenbox did last year in Oklahoma City, and OG&E plans to use both technologies in their new project, Eric Dresselhuys, Silver Spring's vice president of markets, said Thursday.

The 42,000-meter deployment is part of a 771,000-smart meter rollout that OG&E just got $130 million in Department of Energy grant funding for on Tuesday (see DOE's $3.4B Smart Grid Grant Program: The Winners).

Details of that broader deployment were awaiting state regulator approval of the utility's request to raise customer rates to recover the remaining costs of the project, which is expected to total about $300 million, the utility said Thursday.

With $3.4 billion in DOE grants announced Tuesday - enough to deploy 1.8 million smart meters, one million in-home energy displays, 175,000 load management devices, 170,000 smart thermostats, 200,000 advanced transformers and 700 automated substation systems over the course of the next three years or so – expect more of these announcements in the coming days.