Probably the most recognized part of the smart grid is the meter. The smart grid is much more than just smart meters, but for now lets look at what these meters will be designed to do.

The smart meter is a meter that can communicate from the utility to the consumer and also from the consumer to the utility. The smart meter can recieve pricing data real time and will be able to relay it to household appliances. It can recieve demand response signals to help reduce the load on the electrical system in an emergency and help prevent the need for load shedding or rolling blackouts.

One more very important function of the smart meter is that it will report when your power is out. Believe it or not, for many utilities around the country in some areas the first notification they get that the power is out is phone calls from people! With smart meters the notification to the utility operators that there is an outage will be instant. The information from the meters will help the utility diagnose how large the outage is and also where the problem is that caused the outage.

In summary the smart meter will help utilities increase reliability and outage response.