The V.I. Water and Power Authority voted Thursday to award Itron a four-year, $30 million contract to replace the U.S. Virgin Islands’ failed advanced metering infrastructure, or AMI.
Along with Tantalus Systems, Itron was previously tapped by WAPA in 2015 to install the territory’s “smart grid” AMI system, which was supposed to allow the authority to remotely determine its customers’ energy usage and bill accordingly. Itron provided the electricity meters and Tantalus handled the system’s communications network.
The companies and WAPA are defendants in an ongoing class action lawsuit filed in 2021 by customers who say they continued receiving dramatically — and unlawfully — overinflated bills after the system was implemented.
The chorus of customer complaints crescendoed last summer, prompting some lawmakers in the 35th Legislature to publicly call on the utility to stop overestimating bills while providing customers with spotty-at-best reliability. During a meeting of the V.I. Public Services Commission in August, WAPA CEO and Executive Director Karl Knight said the authority would have to continue relying on estimated billing until the system could be replaced because the existing AMI hadn’t worked properly since hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.
In September, WAPA expanded its customer service hours to include Saturdays to accommodate customers who wished to dispute their electric bills.
The short list of vendors considered for the FEMA-funded AMI replacement included Aclara, Honeywell, Landis+Gyr and Itron. WAPA electrical engineer Belgrave Stedman said during a presentation to the governing board Thursday that Itron provided the most complete bid and scored highest based on technological criteria. Itron’s proposal was rated second in cost-effectiveness.
V.I. Energy Office Director and board member Kyle Fleming noted Thursday that one of the previous system’s “Achilles’ heels” was thermal regulation and asked presenters if that point of failure had been taken into account during the procurement process.
Consultant Ron Smith, of Z2Solutions, said they looked at “everything from the outside of the meter, the color of the meter, all the way to the inside of the meter and how the meter vendors were now protecting their devices due to extreme temperatures” and questioned vendors extensively about whether prolonged heat exposure will damage the units.
“Certainly, the answer back from Itron — as well as other vendors, to be honest — was that no, their expectation was that on a day-to-day basis, these meters can now operate in these environments,” he said. “But to your specific question, there was a lot [questioning], a lot of interrogation, a lot of due diligence, as well as dismantling of the meters down to the component level to evaluate that.”
