Jeff St. John 06 23 09, 2:38 PM

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Silver Spring in 600,000-Home Sacramento Smart Meter Project

Silver Spring Networks has landed another utility deal – this one for a 600,000-smart meter deployment by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based smart grid networking startup will be installing its technology in meters from Landis+Gyr that SMUD intends to start installing next month and have in place for all of its roughly 600,000 customers by early 2011, it reported Tuesday.

That's on top of the millions of meters that Silver Spring is installing its Internet protocol-based, RF mesh-enabled systems in for such customers as Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Florida Power & Light and American Electric Power, Commonwealth Edison Co. and Australian utilities Jemena Electricity Networks and United Energy Distribution (see GE, Silver Spring Land ComEd Smart Meter Pilot and Silver Spring Heads Down Under).

But the Sacramento project is unique among them in that it's a municipal utility, rather than an investor-owned utility, noted Eric Dresselhuys, Silver Spring vice president of markets.

While investor owned utilities have been making the largest smart meter and other smart grid investments to date, "I think we're going to see more stuff happening with muni's" in the future, Dresselhuys said.

At least one other municipal utility – Austin Energy in Austin, Texas – has taken a leading role, with 410,000 smart meters, 86,000 smart thermostats and about 2,500 distribution grid sensors already deployed. It is also planning a large-scale smart grid project, the Pecan Street Project, which includes such IT giants as Dell, GE Energy, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Cisco Systems and Microsoft (see Top Ten Smart Grid: Utilities).

The Sacramento deployment is part of SMUD's "Smart Capital Initiative," and is meant to include other smart grid systems like distribution automation and home area networks at a future date.

Dresselhuys said that it's too early to talk about how Silver Spring may be involved in those next-step projects, as SMUD has yet to announce its plans.

"We're going to start doing some smaller-scale stuff around home area networking and distribution automation – it will be very much in the test mode initially," he said.