Ohio's Final Workgroup Report On Smart Meter Data Access: Are We There Yet? Not Quite, Kids….

It may be 2020, but some big issues have carried over from the last decade at the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, including the question of what the Commission will do to facilitate customer and third-party access to AMI (or "smart meter") electricity consumption data. As avid followers of the PUCO (all 14 of us) will remember, the state is heading toward near-universal AMI rollout for most of its investor-owned utilities. Accordingly, a key focus of the Commission's "PowerForward" discussions beginning in 2017 was how to realize customer value from Ohioans' investment in AMI meters.

The PUCO's 2018 PowerForward Roadmap ultimately recommended that "standardized access to customer energy usage data (CEUD) for CRES [competitive retail electric service] providers and other third parties should be viewed as a fundamental and core component of the [modern utility] platform," so that AMI data can "be used to better enable customer choice to inform customers of their