Recently, Hansen joined one of our customers, City of New Bern, in a webinar hosted by the American Public Power Association.
We are delighted to share here the full recording.
For those who prefer to read, below is a slight variation of what we discussed.
The AMI 2.0 Reality
AMI 2.0 is transforming utilities with better support for modern grids through Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) 2.0 is redefining how utilities operate in an increasingly complex, modern grid environment. Moving far beyond traditional hourly or daily meter reads, AMI 2.0 delivers high-resolution, near-real-time insights into consumption, leaks, voltage, and power quality. It enables faster, two-way communication between utilities and meters, supports improved outage management and grid reliability, and brings edge computing capabilities that push analytics and decision-making closer to the customer. At the same time, it strengthens regulatory reporting and operational transparency while enabling seamless integration of renewables and bidirectional power flows, positioning utilities to meet evolving demands with greater agility and control.
But more data doesn’t automatically translate into better outcomes. Charlie Bauschard, Utility Director at the City of New Bern, recognised early on that a standalone AMI system, while powerful, could quickly lead to data overload without the right structure in place. To turn that influx of high-resolution data into actionable insight, the city made the strategic decision to invest in a Meter Data Management (MDM) solution, enabling them to validate, organise, and operationalise their data across systems.
Located in eastern North Carolina, New Bern is a historic coastal community known for its picturesque waterfront, colonial roots, and steady population growth. As a municipally owned utility serving both electric and water customers, New Bern faces the dual challenge of maintaining reliable service while modernising infrastructure to meet evolving regulatory and customer expectations. By pairing AMI 2.0 capabilities with a robust MDM foundation, the city is better equipped to improve billing accuracy, enhance outage response, detect leaks faster, and deliver greater transparency.
As utilities modernise, evolving utility data analytics and retail rate design is no longer optional. Today’s customers expect flexibility, transparency, and control over how much they use and spend. With the right technology foundation, combining AMI 2.0, a robust Meter Data Management (MDM) system, and a self-service customer portal, utilities can move beyond static, one-size-fits-all pricing models. Instead, they can design more responsive, data-driven rates that align with real usage patterns and customer preferences.
Charlie says: “Customers need flexibility on how much they want to buy and use. They want to see their usage in real time. The right technology lets me do a better job with rate design to meet that need. With AMI 2.0, MDM, and self-service portal, it’s possible for customers to see the data the day after usage. One practical use case is that customers can set their monthly budget and once half of their monthly budget is used, I would like to alert them to help them control spending.”
At a certain point, the City’s customer surveys made one thing clear: expectations had shifted, and customers were ready, if not demanding, more digital, transparent experiences. For New Bern, this became a catalyst for change. Under the leadership of Charlie, the utility prioritised automating the entire meter-to-cash process, creating a seamless flow from usage data to billing and customer engagement.
This strategy has proven to be a win-win for both the utility and its customers. On one hand, the utility gains the insights needed to introduce more dynamic and responsive rate structures, such as time-of-use pricing or demand-based rates, while improving forecasting and operational efficiency. On the other, customers benefit from greater visibility, fewer billing surprises, and more control over their usage and spending. In this way, data analytics doesn’t just enhance back-end operations; it becomes the foundation for a more transparent, flexible, and customer-centric utility experience.
The Challenge: When More Data Becomes a Burden
Utilities today are facing a surge in complexity driven by growing volumes of meter data across both electric and water systems, often collected through multiple AMI and metrology platforms. At the same time, many teams remain heavily reliant on manual processes and exception handling, with limited staff stretched across critical operations.
This creates a fragmented environment where visibility is siloed, teams spend more time fixing data than using it, and increasing pressure is placed on billing accuracy and customer service. As a result, what may appear to be a technology challenge is, in reality, a broader issue spanning people, processes, and workflows.
To move forward, utilities must not only modernise their systems but also rethink how their teams operate and leverage data. This includes improving outage management and grid reliability, integrating renewables and bidirectional power flows, and delivering more granular customer insights. With the right foundation, utilities can enable capabilities such as consumption comparisons across similar customer cohorts, proactive alerts for excessive usage, and personalised recommendations to help customers reduce costs. These insights also support conservation initiatives and demand-response programs, while strengthening regulatory reporting and operational transparency, ultimately shifting the focus from managing data to unlocking its full strategic value.
Charlie says, “For the utility division in New Bern, the need to evolve and continuously modernise became clear as operational risks began to impact both efficiency and customer trust. Some of our largest revenue-generating customers were still being billed manually, a process inherently prone to errors, delays, and inconsistencies. If high-value customers become dissatisfied and choose to leave, the our utility is still responsible for maintaining its infrastructure. Those fixed costs don’t disappear, they get redistributed across the remaining customer base, leading to higher rates and creating a negative cycle. Modernisation, therefore, is not just an operational upgrade; it’s a necessary step to protect revenue stability, maintain customer satisfaction, and ensure long-term sustainability.”
At the end of the day, implementing AMI 2.0 and Meter Data Management (MDM) is strategically important and goes far beyond a simple cost-benefit analysis. For municipalities like New Bern, utilities operate within an enterprise fund model, meaning they must maintain a steady and predictable revenue stream generated directly from customer usage. This revenue supports not only the day-to-day operations of the utility, such as maintenance, staffing, and infrastructure upgrades, but also contributes to the city’s broader financial health.
In many cases, a portion of utility revenue is transferred into the general fund to help support essential public services like police, fire, and community programs. Because of this, billing accuracy, effective rate design, and strong customer retention are critical. These factors directly impact not just utility performance, but the overall municipal budget. In this way, the utility fund becomes a financial backbone for the city, making reliability, transparency, and operational efficiency mission-critical not only for customers, but for the entire community.
The City of New Bern is also leveraging meter analytics to support affordability initiatives for low-income residents. Analyzing near real-time usage data allows the utility to provide greater transparency into consumption patterns and enable more flexible billing approaches. This will support redesigning rates that charge base fees considering the actual demand and usage profile which better represent low-income customers and help to lower their costs. An added benefit will be that instead of relying solely on monthly, after-the-fact billing, New Bern can identify customer-specific high-usage trends earlier and support targeted outreach. This will allow the customer to make any corrections or at least let them know what to expect when the bill arrives. This data-driven approach not only helps residents better understand and manage their utility costs, but also empowers the utility to deliver more equitable, responsive service to the community.
The Shift: Building a Data-Driven Utility Team
Utilities are increasingly shifting from reactive to proactive operations, but becoming truly “data-driven” requires more than just collecting data, it requires trust, accessibility, and actionability. In practice, this means having confidence in meter data, enabling faster and more informed decision-making, and reducing reliance on manual intervention. It also means empowering customers to act as partners by giving them visibility into their usage and tools to manage it effectively. As a result, teams spend less time firefighting issues and more time analyzing trends and optimising performance. This shift fosters stronger collaboration across billing, IT, operations, and even the end customer, while reducing dependency on tribal knowledge and creating a more scalable, resilient utility operation.
Charlie says, “ I’m encouraging my team to be critical thinkers – to look at the data and solve problems around customer experience. I’m breaking down silos between divisions. For example, they should be asking – if I’m buying more power, am I selling more power? An MDM enables my team to better understand their services.”
An MDM enables a utility team to become true problem solvers by transforming overwhelming volumes of raw meter data into trusted, actionable insight. In environments like New Bern, AMI systems collect massive amounts of high-frequency data, but on their own, they simply pass that raw information downstream, often to billing systems that aren’t designed to process or interpret it at that level of detail. This creates a bottleneck where teams are stuck reconciling inconsistencies instead of focusing on higher-value work.
Charlie says, “That’s where the MDM becomes critical. It acts as the first layer of intelligence, cleaning, validating, and organising incoming data while storing detailed interval reads and establishing a single source of truth. More importantly, it calculates the Billing Determinant (BD), which is the precise, validated usage value needed for billing. Once the BD is created, the billing system can efficiently apply rates and generate accurate bills without being burdened by raw data complexity.”
For leaders like Charlie, this shift is transformative. By automating data validation and billing preparation, the MDM frees up the team from manual data cleanup and exception handling. Instead, they can focus on analyzing trends, identifying inefficiencies, improving customer programs, and making proactive, data-driven decisions, ultimately elevating their role from data processors to strategic operators.
The Approach: Modernising Without Disruption
One of the key advantages of modernizing with an MDM-led approach is that it does not require a disruptive “rip and replace” of existing systems. Instead, utilities can integrate seamlessly with their current technology stack, including CIS, AMI systems, and customer portals, while supporting multiple services such as electric, water, gas, district heating, and district cooling. This flexibility also extends to environments with multiple AMI providers, allowing utilities to unify data across diverse sources without forcing standardisation at the hardware level. Ultimately, this approach enables modernisation with minimal operational disruption, ensuring continuity of service while incrementally enhancing capabilities.
The Role of Cloud-Native MDM
A modern, cloud-native MDM platform removes much of the infrastructure burden from utility teams while enabling them to fully handle the scale and complexity of AMI 2.0 data. By automating critical processes like validation, estimation, and editing (VEE) as well as exception management, it significantly reduces manual intervention and operational overhead. At the same time, it brings together data from across systems into a unified, trusted source, ensuring consistency, improving visibility, and allowing teams to focus on insights and decision-making rather than data reconciliation.
Charlie says, “Working with Hansen Technologies and its MDM and CIS solutions has exceeded both my expectations and those of my staff. The real power of the platform lies in its ability to connect MDM data directly to the customer service portal, creating a seamless flow of accurate, near real-time information from meter to customer. This tight integration positions Hansen uniquely in the market, enabling a level of visibility and engagement that standalone systems struggle to achieve. By bridging operational data with the customer experience, Hansen delivers a more connected, transparent solution that sets it apart from other MDM offerings.”
Looking Ahead: Preparing for What’s Next
As utilities look ahead, one thing is certain: AMI data volumes will only continue to grow, and customer expectations for transparency, flexibility, and control will rise alongside it. To keep pace, utilities need scalable and flexible foundations that can adapt to increasing complexity without adding operational burden. For leaders like Charlie, the vision is clear, leveraging this technology landscape not just to improve operations, but to build a more sustainable and affordable future for the community. By stabilising and leveling costs for consumers while empowering teams with better data and tools, utilities can move beyond short-term fixes and create long-term value for both their organisation and the customers they serve.
