NSTAR Interim Report
Feb. 28, 2013
NSTAR
NSTAR Electric & Gas Corporation (the Company, or NSTAR) developed and implemented a Smart Grid pilot program beginning in 2010 to demonstrate the viability of leveraging existing automated meter reading (AMR) deployments to provide much of the Smart Grid functionality of advanced metering infrastructure, but without the full investment that would result from premature replacement of existing assets. In particular, a central objective of the pilot was to enable residential dynamic pricing (time-of-use [TOU] and critical peak pricing [CPP] rates and rebates) and two-way direct load control by continually capturing AMR meter-data transmissions and communicating through customer-sited broadband connections in conjunction with a standards-based Home Area Network (HAN). This enabled recording of interval consumption data and transfer of data to NSTAR via a two-way communications pathway that was a also used for sending load control signals and measuring demand response load impacts.