Case Study: United Energy achieves smarter grid operations and safety improvements with Itron AMI analytics

How much benefit can a utility derive from the analysis of AMI data

United Energy, an Australian electricity utility, needed to get more value from its mandated AMI rollout beyond basic billing and outage reporting. Working with Itron and its SensorIQ analytics software, the company sought a way to use smart meter data to improve grid performance, safety, and compliance across its roughly 653,000 meters.

Itron’s SensorIQ solution gave United Energy a parallel analytics path that collected high-frequency voltage, current, and power factor data without disrupting billing systems. The results included 1,200 proactive neutral-integrity repairs in 2016 with a 98% fault-identification success rate, more than 50% fewer electric shocks, $15 million in deferred annual service replacement spend, 150 theft cases identified in the first year, and significant avoided costs from better fault location, transformer monitoring, and load balancing.

United Energy

Tobie de Villiers

United Energy’s Network Intelligence Manager