Creighton is a candidate for a new SaskPower pilot project.
Town council received a letter from SaskPower’s director of advanced metering infrastructure, Cheryl Robertson, during its July 10 meeting.
In the letter, the Crown corporation representative voiced interest in having a smart meter placed in Creighton at a town-owned facility.
The town was “selected to receive a smart meter as part of this pilot project,” reads the letter from Robertson.
Smart meters were first installed at Saskatchewan homes and businesses in 2014. The new meters are designed to gauge time-of-use electricity while being more energy efficient and more accurate than traditional electricity meters.
After several of the meters caught fire with no outside cause in the months after they were installed, more than 100,000 of them were removed, costing the province almost $50 million in expenses.
About 7,500 smart meters would be placed in areas around Saskatchewan under the pilot project.
“They’re asking us if we would be interested in participating in it with a few of our town buildings,” said Mayor Bruce Fidler.
“The residential smart meters we installed at the time met the safety standards of the industry, but 10 of them failed in a way that was unacceptable,” reads the letter.
Any issues relating to overheating or combustion – now believed to be caused by moisture and contamination – are said to have been fixed with the new generation of meters.
Fidler said that, in the past, smart meter installations had only taken place in southern Saskatchewan.
“That was all down south. That’s where it all initiated. This is the first I’ve known about it moving to the north,” he said.
“We’ll look at it,” he added.
