SWI

This report provides the findings of a third party evaluation of a major smart metering project conducted by Wide Bay Water Corporation (WBWC). The Evaluation has been undertaken by the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC) and the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF), at the University of Technology, Sydney, on behalf of the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA).

WBWC installed the first residential automatic water meter reading (AMR) system in Australia on a city-wide scale and are the first utility internationally to require an advanced level of data storage, issue reporting and data manipulation functionality at this scale. The AMR Project “Wide Bay Water Smart Metering and Sustainable Water Pricing Initiative Project” has been funded in part by the Australian Government’s Water Smart Australia Program. It has involved the installation of over 20,000 residential AMR water meters in phases since 2006 and the set-up of the associated data capture, billing and management systems.

This AMR Project represents an extremely important step forward in understanding how this rapidly emerging technology can be used effectively in water planning and management. The experience of WBWC can be used to provide insight into how the implementation process has and could be undertaken but also to assist in setting direction for future AMR systems taken up in Australia.

 

Research themes

• Billing

• Data management

• Automated Meter Reading (AMR)

• Technology adoption

 



For more information contact Andrea Turner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Project outputs

 

Turner, A.J., Retamal, M.L., White, S., Palfreeman, L. & Panikkar, A. 2010, Third party evaluation of Wide Bay Water smart metering and sustainable water pricing initiative project, prepared for the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, Canberra, the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation in assoc. with the Institute for Sustainable Futures.