CEDAR RAPIDS (SPECIAL)Alliant Energy Corporation’s (NYSE: LNT) Interstate Power and Light Company subsidiary (Alliant Energy) expects to file two American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grant applications with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Investment Grant Program Thursday.

The largest of the two grant applications requests $45 million for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in Iowa and Minnesota. The grant could help bring the first components of Smart Grid technology to Alliant Energy’s Iowa and Minnesota customers a year earlier than originally planned and with less cost to customers.

AMI installation will allow customer usage data to be transmitted to our customer service and billing teams. Alliant Energy staff will no longer have to access customer property to read meters, reducing the need for estimated billings. The AMI meters will also help utility crews respond to outages more effectively.

The deployment of AMI is also a first step toward potential new advanced energy efficiency and usage management tools for customers. AMI, combined with other new technologies still being developed and tested, could help manage system load and capacity, provide utility system operators greater reliability monitoring and allow greater integration of renewable and distributed energy resources, such as wind, solar and bio-gas.

“Smart Grid technology is vital to providing future generations of customers with safe, reliable, affordable and environmentally responsible energy. Partnering with our customers to build a smart energy future is expected to bring long-term cost savings to customers by providing them the tools needed to manage their own energy usage while also creating operational efficiencies for Alliant Energy,” said Tom Aller, President of Alliant Energy’s Interstate Power and Light Company. “Funds from this stimulus program would allow us to start installing AMI next year, reducing the impacts of front-end costs to our customers while bringing new work to our vendors a year earlier,” Aller added.

If grant funding is approved and Alliant Energy gains regulatory support, initial installation of AMI-enabled metering devices could begin in 2010. The installation of approximately 750,000 advanced electric and natural gas meters is expected to take three years.

A second ARRA grant request would fund approximately half of a pilot project to utilize AMI and other smart grid technologies in the City of Dubuque, Iowa. The pilot is part of a larger project being undertaken by the City to become a Climate Showcase Community. Along with installation of about 1000 advanced meters for the pilot, Alliant Energy would use grant funds to test and evaluate other energy-saving smart grid technologies such as Programmable Communicating Thermostats and online real-time energy usage tools for customers. This pilot would be critical to identify appropriate and valuable technologies to implement throughout Alliant Energy’s service territory when the AMI installation project has been completed.

The Department of Energy expects to begin awarding grants in the fourth quarter of 2009.