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December eyed for smart meters to go live on Rota
The Commonwealth Utilities Corp. is targeting December for their “smart” prepaid meters to begin operating on Rota.
According to chief financial officer Matthew Yaquinto, they are looking at Dec. 1, 2015, for the meters to go online.
“We wanted to go online on Dec. 1, so we gave PayGo until [Nov.] 16th to get everything set up so we can upload it in the system and we’ll have two weeks to test the meters that are out there,” Yaquinto said in Thursday’s board meeting.
PayGo is the service that will monitor the usage and consumption of CUC’s customers.
“We need that to interface with the meters and interface with our system,” Yaquinto said.
He said the system will be easier for the customers than to “buy the tokens with the little numbers on them.”
“It allows us to monitor the system remotely and allows the customer to do more things. From their standpoint, they’ll know how much they have in the meter, how much they’ve consumed during the night,” Yaquinto said.
The smart meters are easy to install and the customers don’t have to pay for it. Yaquinto said CUC has about a thousand of the meters but is not sure how many are on service.
“We’re going to order more. We have 12,000 customers, so I’d like to get almost as many people on [the meters] as possible,”
Last September, 300 meters were sent to Rota and another 300 to Tinian. For Saipan, Yaquinto said there are prepaid meters but not smart meters.
