Itron Inc., of Liberty Lake, has landed five orders from water utilities for advanced metering systems and a sixth for a leak-detection system since Feb. 17, achieving results in a part of the utility industry that's much more fragmented than electricity and gas.

The company has landed contracts to deploy advanced metering systems in the Rancho California Water District, near Temecula, Calif.; the town of Arlington, Mass., six miles northwest of Boston; the city of Sand Springs, Okla., just west of Tulsa; the city of Stillwater, Okla.; and for Yorkshire Water, which is headquartered in Bradford, in northern England, in the United Kingdom.

Itron will deploy its advanced leak-detection system for the Providence Water Supply Board, in Rhode Island. It says the 8,000 sensors it will deploy in the system can detect a pinhole leak and can transmit leak data to a drive-by collector.

"We have had some nice success recently," says Deloris Duquette, Itron's vice president of investor relations and corporate communications, who will be moving into a new role with the company. "Primarily, a lot of these are driven by part of the stimulus bill that was approved last February" by Congress.

Some of the contracts involve environmental grants, says Duquette, who adds, "We see water as a growth area. We always have."

The flurry of orders shows Itron has "momentum" in the water industry, "and that the stimulus bill is starting to work," Duquette says.

The project in the United Kingdom is the largest. It includes deployment of up to 500,000 residential water meters as well as commercial water meters, all of which will be equipped with Itron's newest generation EverBlu automatic meter reading module, the company says. In addition, it says, up to 500,000 of the EverBlu modules will be supplied for retrofitting of Itron water meters that already have been installed throughout Yorkshire Water's service territory. The automated system will be installed over a five-year period.

"We believe the contract represents the largest AMR (automatic meter reading) deployment within the UK water and wastewater industry, clearly placing Yorkshire Water and Itron at the forefront of AMR deployment in the UK water sector," says Marcel Regnier Sr., vice president and chief operating officer of Itron International, based in Brussels, Belgium.

Andy Clark, metering manager for Yorkshire Water, called the Itron equipment "the best available technology" and said it will deliver "excellent read performance, significant operational efficiencies, and enhanced customer service."

Itron will install its Water SaveSource system at 12,500 "endpoints" for the town of Arlington, Mass.; at 17,000 and 12,000 "endpoints," respectively, for the cities of Stillwater and Sand Springs, Okla., and at 22,000 endpoints for the Rancho California Water District. Itron uses the term endpoint because it's supplying its own encoder, receiver, and transmitter module to be used on water meters made by others. The Water SaveSource system collects incremental meter readings and logs data, enabling analysis of customer usage and the tracking of water losses, helping utilities to improve customer service and to provide data for in-home leak-detection programs, Itron says.

While those contracts call for the installation of far fewer numbers of units than some previous Itron contracts for millions of electricity or gas meters, it's important to remember that 55,000 U.S. water utilities control 70 million meters, but just 200 investor-owned utilities control 120 million energy meters, Duquette says.

"Every little city has a water utility," she says.