According to a new analysis ‘Smart Grid Economics: Making the Business Case for Smart Network Technology’ by the American Utilities Telecom Council (UTC), a typical electric utility can expect smart grid technology to generate at least $110 million per year through a wide range of benefits, from increased rate of return to lowered carbon emission to new jobs creation. The study calculated the economic impacts of a comprehensive smart grid deployment for a typical utility that installs one million electric meters.

The analysis showed that for a comprehensive smart grid deployment involving a full set of programmes in three key areas – advanced metering and outage management, distribution automation and distributed energy resources, the typical utility may expect to require capital investment of $828 million over three years.

The system benefits calculated by the end of a ten-year forecast period are likely to exceed $110 million per year. In addition the system reliability is increased from 99.48% to 99.75%, reducing outage minutes by 16.8 million customer-minutes.

See also: http://www.utc.org/