From Smart Meters to Smart Energy Usage: Check out PSEG Long Island’s Newest Educational Tool

PSEG Long Island is hard at work building new, high-tech infrastructure that will make our bills more accurate, improve our storm response and give our customers unprecedented control over their energy usage.

Smart meters are at the core of this project, known as the Advanced Metering Initiative or AMI. Every week, PSEG Long Island installs about 6,400 of these devices, which transmit energy readings wirelessly every 15 minutes. They spare our customers the inconvenience of dealing with a meter reader visiting their homes, eliminate the “estimated reads” that must be reconciled later, can report outages automatically, and allow customers to see their energy usage patterns in near real-time.

While we are making things even easier for our customers, we also want to make sure that everybody truly understands the new benefits and how they fit in with PSEG Long Island’s mission to provide outstanding reliability, excellent customer service and opportunities to save energy to all 1.1 million of our customers on Long Island and in the Rockaways.

That’s where the My Smart Energy Lab comes in.

From showcasing the benefits of smart meters to teaching children about electrical safety, this new, interactive educational tool will appear in neighborhoods and civic events where smart meter installations are scheduled to occur. It made its public debut in July at the Marcum Workplace Challenge, the largest corporate picnic on Long Island.

The 48-foot trailer is powered entirely by roof-mounted solar panels. Its 12 interactive learning stations start by teaching visitors the basics of the electrical grid before answering common customer questions like which household devices use the most power, which special, optional electric rate is right for them, and which portions of a home’s electrical equipment are the customer’s responsibility and which are PSEG Long Island’s.

Several of the exhibits explain the smart meters I mentioned above. Visitors can learn when each ZIP code will have full smart meter deployment and can test out the associated tools in My Account that give customers powerful, actionable insights into their electric usage habits.

I am also proud to say that the My Smart Energy Lab was proposed, designed and developed by our own PSEG Long Island employees in order to give our customers better insight into the energy grid, renewable energy, emerging technologies and other important subjects. Special thanks to Barbara Klein a program manager on our Customer Experience team, who shared her expertise from conversations with hundreds of customers about smart meters.

We’re excited about the My Smart Energy Lab its potential to tell the story of innovations like smart meters — and, more importantly, the story of who we are and what we do. Please visit www.psegliny.com/smart for more information.