Pepco Set to Start $168.1 Million in Smart Grid Projects

April 16, 2010 by Elias Shams 3 Comments

by Elias Shams
Remember the Pepco guy coming to your house to read the meter? It looks like those days might be over soon. Six months after landing $168.1 million in federal stimulus funds, Pepco is now set to begin building smart grid projects in DC, Maryland and New Jersey.

The company will formally start the projects this week. All told, $104.8 million will go toward smart grid projects in Maryland, with $44.6 million going toward projects in DC and the remainder for projects in Atlantic City, N.J. The funds will help offset the cost to customers for installing meters and modernizing the electric grid.

Once completed, the projects will, among other things, allow Pepco to electronically read meters, provide customers with detailed information on their energy use and let the company use email and text messages to alert customers about outages and service restoration.

I wonder if Pepco’s smart Grid solution is from Cisco recently acquired company, Grid Net which is supposed to monitor and manage power distribution infrastructure via their WiMax technology. I would love to blog about the technical implementation of the project, but this is the best I know. Does anyone know more about this project?

Filed under Business & Finance, Tech Tagged with Atlantic City, d.c, DC, installing meters, Maryland, modernizing the electric grid, N.J., New Jersey, Pepco, smart grid, Smart Grid Projects, washington

About Elias Shams
I have been a serial entrepreneur in telecom and social media space for past 12 years or so. I hold a M.S. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the George Washington University and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. I’ve lived and worked in many countries and cities including London England, Tehran Iran, Bonn Germany, Paris France, Alicante Spain, Delhi India, and my favorite of all Washington, DC of great US of A. Two of the greatest Washington, DC based companies I worked for and very proud of are Yurie Systems which was sold to Lucent in 1998 for $1.23 B and telezoo.com that I founded in 1999. I am currently the founder and awesomizer @ awesomize.me