Frequently Asked Questions about AMI

Q:  What is Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI)
A:   AMI uses a meter specially equipped to remotely and systematically communicate to Gibson EMC information including the amount of electricity used by the customer-owner, blinks or momentary power interruptions, and power outages occurring at the customer-owner’s service point. 

Q: What drove Gibson EMC’s decision to covert to this technology?
A:  Gibson EMC is continually seeking out ways to better serve our customer-owners.  After considerable analysis, our board and management determined that AMI technology would be a sound financial investment that also would enable us to improve customer service. 

It is a win-win; the savings AMI generates pays for the equipment while the additional and more expedient information it generates results in better service.

Q:  What are the benefits of AMI to customer-owners (direct and indirect)?
A:  AMI improves the accuracy of meter reading and it enables us to provide more information to the customer-owners about their use of energy.  Before AMI, we were only able to determine the amount of electricity used between readings performed at the site of the meter; the readings usually covered a month’s usage since that was our normal reading frequency.  With AMI, Gibson EMC receives information from customer-owners’ meters on a daily basis. 

AMI also provides blink and outage information to Gibson EMC.  This helps us pinpoint outages, enables us to get personnel to the problem area more quickly, identify specific customers affected by an outage, and confirm power restoration to those customer-owners before our personnel leave an area. (Of course, we urge customer-owners to continue to call their local Gibson EMC customer service centers and report outages to aid in rapid service restoration.)   And, because the meter is read remotely, there are fewer occasions when we must come onto a customer-owner’s property, increasing privacy. 

Indirectly, AMI benefits the customer-owner because Gibson EMC has additional data and more accurate data to use for electric system maintenance, planning and engineering; in the long-term, this will yield savings to the cooperative and its customer-owners.  Less substantial, will be the savings AMI will produce through the aversion of electricity theft.