Verizon Grid Wide and Ashley-Chicot Electric Cooperative

When Ashley-Chicot sends technicians out to read meters, they’re often entering rural areas, which means good network coverage is critical.

According to Rodney Chapman, Ashley-Chicot’s general manager, there are also a host of other unknowns that might make for a less than ideal customer experience. This includes the risk of surprising a homeowner, setting off an alarm or upsetting a homeowner’s dog. Additionally, heavy trucks might damage the property leaving deep ruts that need to be fixed.

“As a utility company, there are always liability concerns,” he said. “Usually technicians are in a bit of a hurry because they have a lot of meters to read in a short time. There are all kinds of logistical-type situations, and they can really interrupt your day.”

These challenges can also lead to costly mistakes, given that meter reading has traditionally been a manual process and that technicians are paid based upon mileage, Chapman said. 

“One error can take half a day to fix. You’ve got to roll a truck again, and you’ve got to communicate with a customer whose bill is clearly wrong,” he said. Human errors can also lead to inaccuracies, which in turn creates more customer service issues. “Not only can you have a disgruntled customer, it’s very time-consuming and not a very good use of resources to have to deal with bad meter readings.” 

To manage the many moving pieces of their work and improve their customer service, Ashley-Chicot needed an end-to-end solution that didn’t require major infrastructure changes.

Ashley-Chicot decided to adopt Verizon Grid Wide: Intelligent Energy. This includes a comprehensive suite of smart energy meter solutions with remote meter provisioning, configuration, monitoring, control and management.

To start, Verizon set up trial meters in rural locations to enable connection with Ashley-Chicot. From there, they expanded to all of the cooperative’s main locations, establishing a plug-and-play solution that connected seamlessly with their systems. “We have places so rural that we can’t talk on the phone, but with Grid Wide, we can read the meter,” Chapman said.

What’s more, Verizon partnered with Ashley-Chicot to not only deploy Grid Wide but also to integrate it with its billing system. With this end-to-end solution, the cooperative could gain efficiencies and cost savings by boosting the speed and accuracy of readings. Prior to partnering with Verizon, for example, Ashley-Chicot was responsible for managing peak demand periods by manually monitoring power usage by irrigation pumps during these times. By Solution integrating Grid Wide into their systems, however, Ashley-Chicot had near real-time access to the data directly from the irrigation pump. Now they have the ability to respond to peak demand event by remotely turning the power on/off.

For Ashley-Chicot, this meant they could provide reliable, affordable electricity to customers, while relying on Verizon to establish and maintain the fully managed infrastructure that enabled that service. For technicians, this meant their work would also be less disruptive to members’ physical environments.