Westar Energy Upgrades to North Central Kansas Areas

Westar Energy Upgrades to North Central Kansas Areas

 

Westar Energy, Inc. is preparing to make a significant capital investment in the communities of Junction City, Manhattan and the surrounding areas by upgrading our electric metering system. We are excited to embark on this $10 million dollar upgrade to provide improved customer service, quicker service delivery and improved outage management all while increasing internal operational efficiencies within Westar.

The digital upgrade, known as AMI (Automated Metering Infrastructure), will provide numerous benefits to the customer. The first and the most impactful being the customer’s ability to view their energy costs and usage in a more granular fashion from the online energy dashboard. The new Energy Dashboard provides customers an opportunity to understand their electrical consumption, costs and value. Customers can set up budget alerts, receive usage spike alerts and they receive weekly and monthly email snapshots of their costs and usage. This is helpful information for customers to understand how their habits and behaviors can have on their consumption.

The digital upgrade allows Westar to read the meter remotely, eliminating the need to be physically close to the meter and on the customer’s property. The upgrade also allows for remote service orders like a connection or disconnection which can be done without sending one of our service person out to complete.

Our timeline for the capital investment upgrade has begun with the installation of network communication equipment. Customers may see Westar trucks in their neighborhoods installing the wireless communication devices called routers and collectors. This is the backbone structure for how the meters will communicate to Westar. The network is a secure, encrypted private wireless network.

Once the network equipment has been installed, we will begin the meter exchanges. Our installers will exchange every meter in an area by first knocking on the customer’s door to let them know they could experience a brief loss of power while the meter upgrade is taking place. They will provide each customer with an informational door hanger regarding the Energy Dashboard. If no one is home and we have access to the meter, we will perform the exchange, leaving behind the door hanger. All customer types will be upgraded to the new metering system, including our commercial customers. The Energy Dashboard is available to all customers through a secure account on our website.

We are very excited about the enhancements and investment we are making in your area. We hope you are too and will help us educate the community about the upgrade. Please feel free to visit our website for more information (https://www.westarenergy.com/Portals/0/Resources/Documents/PDFs/AMI_Summary.pdf) or contact Justin Campbell (785-587-2314 – Manhattan) directly with any further questions.

Warmest regards,

Westar AMI Team

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