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By Jesse Berst

One expert is Jessica Baker of Baltimore Gas & Electric, where she has worked as a smart grid business architect and as smart meter installation project manager. BGE is rolling out 2.1 million smart electric and gas endpoints over four years at a total cost of $480 million. The other is Shanu Nigam of Accenture, where he is a senior manager of the Smart Energy Practice. He has worked with BGE and numerous other utilities on smart meters, smart grid data management, smart grid cyber security and other important initiatives.

Jessica and Shanu put their heads together to come up with a top 10 list of major AMI challenges. These are the issues you never hear about in strategic, theoretical discussions – but that rise up and smack you in the face when you get into actual deployment.

Project management lessons learned

Some of the most intriguing lessons came on the project management side – for instance, how to work with installers and head-end providers.

“You want to deploy the network components first," recommends Accenture's Shanu Nigam. "Then layer in the meters." First, pre-sweep the area to spot potential coverage and installation problems. Then get the core network running. Then drop in the meters with pre-determined saturation targets for an area. If you do it in reverse, you'll have to go back afterwards to fix coverage and connectivity problems. If you have the network up and running already, you can test and troubleshoot meters during installation, saving a return visit.