The Citizen is published by
Corporate Communication
for active and retired
Georgia Power employees.

Address internal
correspondence to:
The Citizen
Bin 10220
241 Ralph McGill Blvd.
Atlanta, Georgia 30308

E-mail
citizen@southernco.com

Retirees
Please report address
changes to the Southern
Company Employee-Retiree
Service Center by calling
1-888-435-7563.

Why AMI?

Listed below are some of the advantages of converting from traditional meters to automated meters through the Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) project:

  • AMI should result in fewer employee injuries by avoiding physical aspects of route-walking (slips, trips and falls, animal bites, etc.)
  • Vehicle accidents should decline; elimination of monthly visits to the meter will vastly reduce the number of vehicles on the road each month and the potential risk associated of having a vehicle accident.
  • Remote outage detection – The meter automatically reports a power outage within seconds of the event.
  • Restoration notification – More accurate outage information will result in significant savings during storms (releasing crews early, call center savings, accurate outage numbers) and enhanced customer satisfaction.
  • Improved response time to customer inquiries – Many inquiries will be able to be handled over the phone (automated response or operator) and eliminate the need for a visit to the customer's premises, thus improving response time.
  • Increased efficiency in collecting load research information.
  • Significant reduction in the number of estimated bills – Since daily billing information will be available in near real-time, there will be no need to estimate bills, which will result in reduced WFMs and call-center loads. We can also minimize unbilled revenue estimating with actual end-of-month readings.
  • Elimination of truck-rolls for off-cycle reads – At the consumer level, we won't visit the meter every month, thus vastly reducing the number of vehicles on the road each month and the associated emissions.
  • Reduction in vehicle emissions
  • Before AMI, the average cost to read meters was projected to rise from 72 cents/monthly meter read in 2006 to approximately 98 cents in 2012, a 36 percent increase. After AMI, costs are expected to be less than half the amount otherwise anticipated.