EDUCATION CENTER
Insight into Smart Grid industry news, interests, and best practices
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Smart Grid in Asia Pacific – Interview with Bryan Spear of Trilliant
Monday, May 20th, 2013
‘Utilities are facing real challenges, and they have an urgent need to
make significant changes, therefore the deployment of smart grid
technologies at large scale will likely accelerate’
Interview with
Bryan Spear
Managing Director, Asia Pacific
Trilliant
What are the current challenges in the industry?
The challenges of the industry vary largely by region. For example, some of North America’s challenges
are modernizing an outdated grid, increasing energy and operational efficiencies, and large numbers of
the skilled workforce rapidly approaching retirement age. Europe is heavily focused on accommodating
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Trilliant Provides Insights on Leading Smart Grid Communications Technology to ASEAN Power Sector Stakeholders in US Reverse Trade Mission
Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
Yesterday, our team of experts here at Trilliant hosted the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Power Sector Stakeholders in a Reverse Trade Mission (RTM), at the invitation of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA). The ASEAN Smart Grid RTM included representatives from Cambodia’s Electricite du Cambodge, Indonesia’s PT PLN, Laos’ Electricite du Laos, Malaysia’s Tenaga Nasional Berhad, the Philippines’ Manila Electric Company, Cagayan Electric Power & Light Company, Aboitiz Power Corporation, Philippine Energy Regulatory Commission, Thailand’s Metropolitan Electricity Authority, Provincial Electricity Authority, Vietnam’s National Power Transmission Corporation and Electricity Vietnam, among others.
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The UK: Opportunities and Challenges of Smart Metering in a Hyper-competitive Energy Market
Friday, April 12th, 2013Great article from Jeff St. John at Greentech Media about the UK’s retailers-led smart metering rollouts, how they differ from the US market and how they may lead to achieving energy efficiency and carbon reduction goals.
To read the whole article, please click here.
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Trilliant UK deal hints at a very different smart grid future
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013From Jesse Berst at the Smart Grid News:
Quick Take: At first glance, Trilliant’s press release today is just another announcement about future prepay capabilities. But look in more detail and you’ll realize that it holds hints about where the UK market is going next. It may even portend a radically different approach to electric power for other regions, including North America.
To read more of the article, please click here.
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Strong Performance at Iberdrola USA, with Help from the Smart Metering Project
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013We are proud to share the good news from Iberdrola USA, one of our customers.
In its recent Annual Meeting in Spain, Iberdrola Chairman, Ignacio Gallan shared that US performance helps Iberdrola sustain profits and dividends in 2012.
Of special note is Iberdrola COO, Jose Luis San Pedro, sharing that… ”the successful completion of CMP’s advanced meter initiative (AMI) in Maine where the company installed 620,000 ‘smart’ meters and the associated mesh network. CMP now gets 98% of its monthly billing data electronically from smart meters, has eliminated nearly 2 million meter-reading vehicle miles per year, and provides customers with detailed online reports about their energy use. This was the largest single smart-grid project ever completed by Iberdrola, and the group intends to share the learning from it throughout its worldwide network.”
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A Department of Energy’s Smart Metering Success Story
Thursday, March 28th, 2013We are delighted to share a great article of one of our customers, Iberdrola USA’s Central Maine Power.
In the article, Sara Burns, CMP’s CEO shared some of the company’s accomplishments and lessons learned.
Trilliant is proud to be a partner of Iberdrola USA’s CMP, in helping them realize the benefits of its smart metering project. Already, CMP is seeing returns on the project by enabling their customers gain better energy awareness and eventually, access new options that enable more energy efficiency in their homes and businesses. What’s more, the Department of Energy (DOE) has hailed this project a Success Story.
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The Importance of Choosing the Right Platform for Smart Grid Integration
Friday, March 1st, 2013We want to share an interesting article recently published in Renew Grid titled – Integrating DA With AMI May Be Rude Awakening For Some Utilities by John McDonald.
Whether you start off with Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and add Distribution Automation (DA) later, or rollout DA first, the author offers some great insights and advice on the need for a well-planned technology roadmap, so your resulting end-state is a truly integrated AMI and DA system.
Trilliant wholeheartedly agrees with the author’s recommendations and in fact our Trilliant Platform was built to address the concerns he raised in the article, including the following three I would like to expand on:
1) McDonald: “Too often, a siloed utility builds two systems, side by side, when a single, well-vetted system could be built to serve both purposes…To assess whether an AMI system will support DA functionality, one needs to weigh the response requirements of the DA applications. Three metrics must be assessed: speed, bandwidth and latency.”
Many AMI vendors have been promoting their solutions as one size fits all Smart Grid networks to serve both metering and DA applications. The reality is there are two distinct classes of DA applications distinguished by the applications requirements for speed, bandwidth, and latency. Typical AMI networks can serve the low performance monitoring applications but are not suited to high performance DA applications thus providing support to the argument for siloed DA and AMI networks. Trilliant has solved this issue with its multi-tier SecureMesh network with a fully integrated high performance WAN tier to support AMI backhaul along with the most demanding DA applications with domain partitioning to provide security and Quality of Service specific to the needs of each application and Layer 2 Ethernet for direct connectivity of the DMS/DA Application to the DA device. SecureMesh WAN offers air data rates of up to 54 Mbps resulting in a throughput of 20 Mbps with a latency of 2ms per hop. And because it is a mesh topology with a range of 10 miles per hop, SecureMesh WAN can cover the largest utility footprint with a minimum of infrastructure, while delivering built-in redundancy and automatic routing failover.
2) McDonald: “The interval meter’s so-called “last gasp” when an outage occurs isn’t metering information; that signal needs to be routed to the OMS, where it can be analyzed to determine the cause and extent of an outage.”
Trilliant is an early developer of this technology and has continuously improved our Unity Suite Head-End System for smart grid applications and specifically OMS reporting. Every Trilliant endpoint can deliver “last-gasp” events without the need for additional costs or infrastructure. Real-time outage events are pushed to a JMS bus that can be easily integrated into any OMS using standard APIs. Equally important is sufficient reserve power in the NIC to filter momentary outages and the network efficiency and bandwidth of the Trilliant AMI network that facilitates delivery of nearly 100% of last gasp messages. This is in sharp contrast to typical AMI networks that cannot filter momentary outages and struggle to deliver 50% of last gasp messages.
3) McDonald: “Voltage data coming back from the end-of-line sensor, in this case the meter, needs to be routed to the DMS to ensure that the utility is achieving the 114v to 126v ANSI standard at the customer premise.”
Every Trilliant advanced meter endpoint has the ability to capture and transmit voltage data such as max, average, and min voltage, without the need for additional costs or infrastructure. In fact we can capture and export any kind of data an advanced meter has been configured to collect. Real-time reporting of this data can be easily integrated into any DMS/CVR system using standard APIs and voltage exceptions, based on user configurable data, are reported immediately.
We hope you find the article of value and Trilliant would welcome the opportunity to help you define a technology roadmap that best meets your needs and enables you to achieve an integrated AMI/DA end-state.
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Energy efficiency programmes are as important as new power generation
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012At the recent British Business Energy Summit, held in London, the Energy Secretary, Ed Davey, announced that the coalition government is undertaking the biggest overhaul of our energy infrastructure in decades, changing the way that the UK makes, saves and uses electricity. This is to be achieved by putting green growth at the heart of the UK economy. He said that an additional 20GW of generating capacity needs to be found over the next 10 years. When you consider that the UK peak electricity consumption is currently around 60GW, this shortfall presents huge opportunities both in building new, green, generating capacity, but also in the way in which we use our energy and through energy efficiency programmes and services.Energy Efficiency has a long way to go in the UK before people put efficiency before additional energy usage. In spite of rising energy bills, 81% of people still have no idea how much they spend on energy, according to a recent YouGov poll ( bit.ly/O3H2QJ ) This survey reveals that only 13% of people in the UK know what their energy bill will be, with that figure dropping to just 5% for the 18-24 age group – the group much more likely to be using additional energy through smart devices and so on. By giving people a much closer relationship with their energy consumption, energy efficiency should become a regular part of everyday life. Simple steps can make big adjustments to energy expenditure. The advice on energy efficiency which is already out there about not filling up kettles, and turning thermostats down by a degree and so on, is largely ignored as there is not direct relationship between these activities and energy bills.Smart Meters are able to provide this direct link between energy consumption and energy efficiency. By showing consumers exactly how much energy they are using, and how much it is costing, simple changes of behaviour will be undertaken naturally. In much the same way that we now buy cars with more efficient engines, due to the visibility of the escalating price of petrol, so we will make more efficient use of our home appliances. We will be able to see how much it costs to leave the lights on and turn the heating down a notch. The rollout of Smart Meters is gathering momentum in the UK, and in order to remove some of the 20GW capacity shortfall, the government needs to keep momentum on energy efficiency initiatives through the smart meter rollout and the wider Green Deal ongoing. After all, people will much prefer to have non-intrusive energy monitors at home than the prospect of a power station next door.NY -
How the Indian blackout will shock the country into action.
Tuesday, July 31st, 2012The ongoing blackout in India, affecting hundreds of millions of people, brings to mind one of the key drivers towards the start of building a smart grid. Shock. In India right now, traffic is gridlocked, hospitals are shut and the lights are out. Many people around the world, including some governments, are unable to see the need for a smart grid, showing a sense of animosity towards energy supply and consumption. The massive, almost catastrophic, shock that a blackout brings shakes this animosity away almost instantly. I’m sure the people of India are re-evaluating their relationship with their energy supply. When public transport shuts down, home appliances can’t be switched on, hospitals close and banks shut their doors, that’s when consumers and businesses suffer, public order becomes an issue and a breakdown of the peace cant be far away. Our need for electricity is so ingrained in modern society, that its sudden removal is devastating. Once India have got the power back on, the time for India to drive change and evaluate grid technology is right behind.A similar thing happened in the US almost 10 years ago, with the collapse of the northeastern grid in 2003. This drove change like no other event could. It drove the legislative agenda at pace, it drove the grid operators to introduce change and new technology, and it drove the consumer need for a stronger relationship with energy. Arguably, the smart grid industry would not be where it is today, were it not for that blackout event.
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Smart Meter security in the UK is being taken seriously
Tuesday, June 12th, 2012There have been a number of scaremongering articles in the UK press lately around smart meter security, with some of the tabloids stoking privacy fears such as utilites knowing what TV channel you are watching, to all out cyber-war on the smart grid. DECC is currently consulting on the licence conditions relating to security for the foundation period of the UK’s Smart Meter Implementation Programme. This consultation outlines specific obligations the government will place on the energy suppliers to ensure the smart meter system and customer data is secure (and it should be noted here that the customer has to explicitly opt-in to providing granular meter data to the utility regardless of the security infrastructure in place).