The California Energy Commission on July 8 approved Agreement EPC-26-001 with Pacific Gas and Electric Company, awarding a $4,095,671 EPIC grant for a demonstration of second-generation smart electricity meters with distributed intelligence applications.
According to the commission’s business-meeting packet, the project — titled Edge Computing on Meters (ECOM) — will run from July 14, 2026, through March 31, 2030 and deploy the technology at 9,000 residences in PG&E’s service territory. The grant request form says the work is intended to test edge-computing use cases that could improve customer affordability, support load growth and electric vehicle adoption, defer traditional distribution transformer investments and reduce wildfire ignition risk.
The scope of work says PG&E will replace existing meters with AMI 2.0-enabled smart meters and use local processing for functions including location awareness, transformer monitoring, high-impedance detection, waveform anomaly detection and EV charger detection and management. It also describes the project as a scaled demonstration meant to validate distributed-intelligence applications and gather data to inform future DI App development, wildfire-risk models and distribution capital planning.
The packet says the commission adopted staff CEQA findings and approved the agreement during its business meeting. It does not identify the neighborhoods or communities selected for the deployment.
Itron Networked Solutions, Inc. is listed as a subcontractor in the grant materials. PG&E’s project lead is identified as Scott Loveless, and Sebastian Rubio Ruiz is listed as the commission’s agreement manager.
