Consider fitness tracking: a basic step counter gives you a pulse on movement, while a smartwatch adds heart rate, sleep quality, and stress insights you’d never get otherwise. Both have value. But if you never act on your steps, no amount of sophisticated tracking later will make you more fit.
When smart meters first rolled out, expectations were sky-high. Utilities, regulators, and vendors spoke of a smarter grid, empowered customers, and data-driven innovation. Today, those early AMI systems have delivered core benefits: interval data, better billing accuracy, faster outage detection, and fewer truck rolls.
Yet the bigger promise of using AMI data to transform planning, enable flexible demand, and support advanced grid operations has too often stalled. As NREL notes, utilities have only begun to test these applications, while in practice AMI is still primarily used as a more accurate meter rather than as the backbone of a dynamic grid.
A program director once joked, “our smart meters are the least smart part of the grid,” pointing to gigabytes of data flowing into warehouses but rarely applied beyond billing. That disconnect spurred the buzz around AMI 2.0: higher-resolution data, near-real-time visibility, deeper integration with edge devices. In a future defined by extreme weather, electrification, and rapid AI data center growth, the allure of jumping straight to 2.0 is obvious.
But here’s the catch: AMI 1.0 is the step counter you already have. AMI 2.0 is the smartwatch with richer features. Both are valuable, but if you ignore the steps, the extra metrics won’t change the outcome. Federal M&V guidance has long recognized that interval data at hourly or 15-minute granularity is sufficient to measure program impacts, validate performance, and establish trust in demand flexibility as a dependable resource. California’s early demand response pilots reinforced this principle: with interval meter data from the state’s first wave of smart meters, utilities were able to quantify load reductions with statistical confidence, and the CPUC ensured regulators could verify the results. Just as importantly, participants could see—often for the first time—that their actions translated into measurable impact.
What’s missing today isn’t better technology. It’s the adoption of methods, governance, and workflows that convert raw data into actionable, trusted signals. Many utilities sit on untapped datasets that could be used to test, refine, and scale demand flexibility programs right now, without waiting for the next hardware cycle.
There’s a real cost to waiting to take action. Deploying next-generation metering will take years: consider procurement, regulatory hurdles, customer outreach, installation, integration. If utilities postpone serious flexibility work until 2.0 arrives, the grid may lose a decade it doesn’t have; NERC’s most recent reliability assessment warns that more than half of North America faces elevated risk of power shortfalls over the next decade.
In contrast, today’s AMI 1.0 data already answers the core questions: did the resource show up? How much did it deliver? How confident are the estimates? With the right analytic frameworks, those answers are clear and defensible.
That’s where Recurve’s FLEX platform delivers value today. FLEX transforms AMI data into validated demand-side performance metrics that regulators can audit, utilities can act on, and providers can deliver against, without waiting on new hardware. It works with the grid we already have.
And as utilities modernize their infrastructure, FLEX is already positioned for the future. The same transparent, auditable methods that make AMI 1.0 actionable today are designed to support the richer streams tomorrow, whether centrally or at the edge. By building trust and governance around demand flexibility now, utilities ensure that when higher-resolution data arrives, it can plug directly into a framework that is already working.
The bigger risk is repeating the cycle of underutilization. Without frameworks and trust built on today’s data, there is no guarantee tomorrow’s richer streams will fare better. Proving 1.0 now isn’t just strategy; it’s insurance for the future.
Demonstrating the tangible benefits of AMI 1.0, not just for billing or outage management, but as a dependable flexibility resource, strengthens the case for regulators, stakeholders, and customers when utilities seek to rate-base AMI 2.0. The surest path to securing support for the next generation is to show the value of the data we already have.