SRP applies for stimulus funds for smart projects
Officials with the Tempe-based utility say the extra money would not diminish the need for an 8.8 percent electric rate increase pending before SRP's board of directors, but it might reduce the size of future rate hikes.
SRP officials say the projects being sought for stimulus funding would give customers more options for controlling their energy use, improve reliability and promote clean energy.
Smart meters can send data via radio signals back to the utility, allowing the meter to be read automatically by a computer at an SRP control center.
SRP has already deployed more than 400,000 smart meters and wants to install another 540,000 by the fall of 2011, when every customer would have one.
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Lebanon Cabinet approves watershed electricity sector reform
BEIRUT - Lebanon’s Cabinet has approved a much-anticipated plan to restructure the country’s dysfunctional electricity sector which hasn’t been developed since the time of the country’s civil war, decades ago.
The Lebanese depend on a network of private generator providers and decrepit power plants that rely on expensive fuel oil. Subsidies to the state electricity company cost nearly $2 billion a year.
For years, reform of the electricity sector has been a major demand of Lebanon’s population of over 5 million. But frequent political stalemates, corruption and infighting among politicians, entrenched since the civil war that began in 1975, often derailed reforms.
International…
