Four reasons, taken together:
- The equipment we use to read and program our current AMR meters has been discontinued by the manufacturer. Once that equipment fails, we will not be able to maintain AMR meters on the system.
- AMR meter failures are already increasing. Continuing to rely on AMR meters past the transition would put accurate billing at risk for the whole membership.
- Blachly-Lane operates with a small workforce. Maintaining a parallel AMR system alongside AMI indefinitely would pull crews off reliability work, outage response, and system maintenance, which serves every member.
- Maintaining two parallel meter systems adds cost that the entire membership pays. The cooperative would need to keep AMR vendor support, programming tools, and staff training in place even as AMR resources are disappearing in the industry.