SAIC Provides Complete Package for Lakeland Electric's Smart Grid Initiative

SAIC is providing the complete program management solution for the Lakeland Electric smart grid initiative. The utility is leading an innovative program for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) within its system. The program will improve operational efficiency, optimize capital investments to minimize energy prices, and facilitate time-of-use pricing to give customers near real time information and allow them more control over their energy usage.

Supporting Customer Efficiency

Lakeland Electric serves more than 128,000 customers within the 258 square miles of its service territory. The Lakeland program, funded in part by a U.S. Department of Energy grant award, is also participating in a customer behavior study to gauge the impact of rate options, improved metering operations, and enhanced outage management. The utility is providing the community with electric meters, equipped with point-to-point AMI communication devices, as well as 3,000 home area network (HAN) devices. These improvements will create an enhanced power grid with higher reliability and more dependable energy delivery than the utility's current system.

"Our smart grid initiative will allow our customers to be more involved in their management of their actual electric usage and their utility bills," said Randy Dotson, Lakeland Electric smart grid initiative project manager. "It will be more efficient with the use of Lakeland's existing infrastructure, existing distribution, transmission, and generation infrastructure."

Providing Complete Solutions

Lakeland selected SAIC for its expertise and resources to address the full spectrum of services: from the technical know-how to develop and deploy the initiative, to the ultimate transfer of the completed project to the utility. The program management and systems integration services provided by SAIC will promote advanced two-way communications between the utility and its customers, and will build a long-term smart grid strategy to curb future demand, improve overall operational efficiency and, ultimately, reduce the utility's annual carbon footprint by 14,000 tons.

"The major aspects of the selection of SAIC is that we saw the experience and expertise in all these different areas, and it wasn't just that they were an expert in one area and they were bringing in other people in other areas — SAIC showed expertise in all of these areas — and was able to integrate that into a package that was very desirable for us," said Dotson.