News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Cookeville has purchased over 15,000 automatic electric and gas meters to improve the city’s infrastructure.
Energy Department Director Carl Haney said they will be able to monitor the meters remotely so they will not have to send an employee out to read them. Haney said the electric meters can also be turned on or off remotely to allow for easier control.
“Also we’ll have some outage management, meaning that if there’s a power outage out there we would know that immediately,” Haney said. “So if someone’s not home and not calling in, we’d already know that that was out of power so we could start working on getting it restored.”
Haney said the installation process for both kinds of meters should not impact citizens with outages or any similar issues. Haney said they tested the system with a small number of meters over the past six months with “really good” results.
“We just identified so many areas within the city that we wanted to install some meters to make sure those communications (were) working, make sure we (were) getting information back, and making sure that information was where we could read it and get it to our billing system,” Haney said.
Haney said the electric meters cost some $1.4 million and the gas meters cost just under $900,000.
“Total project cost on the electric side, everything together we (are) looking at about a $3.6 million project,” Haney said. “Gas is about $1.8 million.”
Haney said they are still waiting for the electric meters to arrive but they are already installing gas meters in the Algood area.
“Right now the projected time is the fall of 2026 to actually get full deployment out there,” Haney said. “Obviously that depends on how available these meters are and how quick they can come in.”
Haney said they have been working on this project several years as they have been searching to find the right software and vendor for these meters.
“Once that’s decided, that sort of determines what meters you use because it has to work with their software and communications,” Haney said.
