A good utility in the past sent out a serviceman with a bunch of phase angle meters and voltage meters. He would take about 45 minutes to verify everything was wired correctly. Another advantage of solid-state electronic meters, says Waters, is abundant information. There are a number of power-quality features manufacturers have built in, and they keep getting better with every new generation. There is certainly value in knowing what's going on at that location, the number of outages, voltage flicker, the level of harmonics.
Remote communication is also often easier with electronic meters.
A lot of the co-ops are talking about remote communications. Some of them are doing that on major accounts, but a lot still just go to the meter and download the data once a month to a laptop. The options you get on electronic meters give the utility the opportunity to do load analysis of the system. That's a reality, and the price is going to continue to come down. I told my wife I'd love to have the digital watch he was wearing.