Do you find these arguments need to be made to a utility before they are open to jumping into AMI, or are these lessons that you find you need to help utilities with once they already have AMI but aren't fully utilizing the opportunities? 

Joel: Great list! Like many of us who have been around the industry for a long time, I remember when a lot of the big AMI implementations were happening. During that era, a consultant at one of the leading professional services firms that was leading a lot of the AMI work in the 2000s - 2010s told me over a lunch meeting one day that, "frankly, when we put the use cases together, beyond the labor and related cost savings with replacing meter readers, we really don't know how AMI and smart grid is going to evolve." While this did not completely surprise me, it did underscore how a little federal funding can generate a lot of activity with very little assessment of its value (and that funding back in the day was practically rounding error when compared to today's federal government energy expenditures).

Getting back to AMI and the resulting data, today there are some great successes that can be traced to those initial AMI implementations, and your list confirms this. I will be so bold to suggest that there are a few other use cases that one might add to your list. A few of these are in and around some of what you have listed, but still merit a closer look:

• Transformer Management: Using smart meter data, along with other data sets like SCADA data and weather data, modeling transformer wear and tear to enable predictive maintenance or even replacement is one use case that holds a lot of promise. In my past life with an analytics provider, our engineers put together some POCs that confirmed this. As reliability becomes a more sensitive issue for utilities (imagine how the public would react if they knew that run-to-failure is the industry standard for many critical assets) and as the economics of predictive operations make more sense, using smart meter data to manage transformers more effectively could become a standard at many utilities.
• Energy Disaggregation: As utilities look to provide new services to customers, energy disaggregation might be the tool that enables new energy and cost saving services and products for utility customers. The visibility into energy usage from energy disaggregation can be the foundation for utilities providing a new level of customer service and engagement, perhaps even changing the traditional role of the utility.
• Complex Billing: As DERs become more prevalent, the challenges of billing accurately with the myriad different programs are mind-bogging. Most CISs that are operating at utilities today are not equipped to wrangle all of that smart meter data, align the right data with the right program, and consistently, automatically produce an accurate, timely bill. Smart meter data helps unlock these complex billing capabilities.

As one can see from your list and my additions, these are indeed interesting times for the utility industry, eh? It'll be fun to see what the industry, especially those critical utility-to-customer relationships enables with smart meter data, will look like in about five years.