Abstract

Black Hills/Colorado Electric Utility Company (BHCOE) is one of three Black Hills Corporation subsidiaries deploying advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)—the other two are Black Hills Power (South Dakota/Wyoming) and Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power (Wyoming). BHCOE’s project includes the deployment of smart meters, communication infrastructure, and a meter data management system (MDMS). The project provides improved outage restoration from the integration of an outage management system with the AMI. Two-way communication allows for off-cycle reads, remote connect/disconnect of customer loads, tamper detection, and potential future implementation of time-based rate programs. BHCOE is also deploying approximately 200 direct load control devices as part of a pilot program to understand customer acceptance and load impacts.