The largest municipal utility in the United States began replacing its 1.5 million electric meters in September 2025, starting in Lincoln Heights — more than a decade after California's investor-owned utilities finished. LADWP is governed by a city commission and sits outside the state programme that authorised those rollouts. Its 700,000 water meters are not part of it.
About a million of LADWP's more than 1.5 million electric meters were still read by hand when the rollout began, alongside 700,000 manually read water meters (Office of Public Accountability, September 2025). The utility gives no completion date beyond 'several years'.
🎓 Lesson
Across this atlas's metering entries, what makes a rollout fast is a legal mandate, not technology. Los Angeles is the converse case: California wrote the framework two decades ago, but it bound the investor-owned utilities, and the city-run utility next door started in 2025.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingLADWP ratepayer revenue; the 52,000-meter 2013 pilot was co-funded by a US Department of Energy grant
Sources
↗ LA Office of Public Accountability / Ratepayer Advocate — LADWP's next smart meter project (17 September 2025)The anchor source, by the city's independent ratepayer watchdog. Verbatim: 'Starting in mid-September, homes and businesses in some areas of the Lincoln Heights neighborhood will begin receiving the next generation'; 'With more than 1.5 million electric meters, about a million of which are read manually'; 'other 700,000 manually read water meters'; 'While water meters are not part of the current effort'; 'it will take several years before all customers are upgraded'. OPA states it is 'encouraged by the utility's measured and integrated approach' and commits to 'keeping a watchful eye on rate impacts'.
↗ LADWP — Advanced Metering Infrastructure (operator)The operator's programme page: gradual replacement of 1.5 million meters plus communications network and data-management integration, building on the 2013 Smart Grid LA programme. Note for the editor: ladwp.com returns HTTP 403 to automated fetching; the page's existence and subject were confirmed via search results only, so nothing in this entry rests on it alone.
↗ CPUC — The Benefits of Smart Meters (regulator)Establishes the comparison and its limit: the state smart-meter programme covers only 'the state's investor owned utilities' — SCE 'approximately 5.3 million new Smart Meters', SDG&E '1.4 million electric Smart Meters and 900,000 natural gas meters', PG&E 'approximately 5 million electric meters and 4.2 million natural gas meters'. Municipal utilities are not addressed on the page.
↗ LAist / KPCC — LADWP flips the switch on 52,000 smart meters (2013)The prehistory that keeps the entry honest: LADWP energised 52,000 smart meters on 1 July 2013 under Smart Grid LA, funded by a US Department of Energy grant with a matching LADWP contribution. A demonstration, not a rollout — it was not extended for another twelve years.
↗ Itron — LADWP expands contract (11 June 2014)Vendor announcement, used only for scale context: 'approximately 40,000 additional cellular advanced meters and data collection software', to be 'installed over three years', supporting time-of-use and net time-of-use metering. Confirms LADWP's pre-2025 advanced metering was in the tens of thousands, not the millions. Vendor source — no deployment count is taken from it.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “LADWP Advanced Metering Infrastructure Rollout” — Los Angeles, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/la-dwp-smart-meters/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
