Fulton has made progress on restoring the Smart Grid's connection to the utility billing system.
"We've been messing with the Smart Grid for what seems like forever," utilities superintendent Darrell Dunlap said.
But Fulton employees will have to continue manually reading utility meters for at least a little while longer, Dunlap said. He gave an update on the situation at last Tuesday's Fulton City Council meeting.
In the early 2010s, with the help of a U.S. Department of Energy grant, the city installed smart meters for every residential and commercial electric customer within city limits. The cost to install the 5,500 or so meters totaled around $3 million, with the federal government paying for half. Since then, the city has paid an additional $1.5 million on the system, Dunlap estimated.
The Smart Grid was supposed to save Fulton employees from having to drive around to manually check each meter in town each month, reducing personnel costs and pollution emissions. It was also intended to help the utility department monitor and quickly pinpoint outages.
But at times, the Smart Grid hasn't lived up to its name. Fulton got an early version of the system under the grant and with it came issues.
"The Smart Grid system did crash early last year, and we had to rebuild the servers," Dunlap said. "When that happened, we lost connection to billing."
The meters still accurately monitor energy consumption - but that information isn't fed back to the billing system. Instead, employees have to go out and take manual readings.
The city was planning to purchase a new billing software anyway, and decided to hold off on reconnecting the two systems until that process was complete. Now, with the new billing system in place, the city's had difficulties getting the necessary permissions from the new vendor to reconnect the billing software with the grid.
"Kathy (Holschlag, Fulton's chief financial officer) has been working on that for several weeks to a couple months, basically since before COVID started," Dunlap said. "About a week ago, Bill (Johnson, Fulton's Director of Administration) stepped in and we called, and Bill did what Bill does, and within about 48 hours we had the passwords."
Yet another vendor - the one that provides Fulton's outage management system - is now writing the necessary computer code to finally link all the systems again.
About 400 of the city's meters need additional maintenance before they come back online, Dunlap added.
"It's been a long process," Johnson said. "We take two steps forward and one step back."
Dunlap anticipates the reconnection is complete, Fulton will have less trouble with the Smart Grid system.
"That old billing system, that was one of the legacy pieces that we had that we didn't buy with the new system," he said. "I think there's always been a struggle making it work. Hopefully this new system that other people have used with Smart Grid will get rid of some of those issues."
Dunlap said he's not sure when the Smart Grid system will be fully restored but estimated it'll take at least a month.