Itron, Inc., a company known innovating new ways for utilities and cities to manage energy and water, has officially announced the launch of its Grid Edge Essentials solution, which happens to be an industry-leading, pre-integrated, real-time technology meant for addressing issues that utilities face at the grid edge, all while accelerating the wider energy transition.
More on the same would reveal how Grid Edge Essentials comes decked up with an ability to streamline and simplify the adoption of new technologies. Such a setup can come in handy when it comes to providing distribution grid visibility right across the grid edge and enhancing consumer engagement. Not just that, Grid Edge Essentials also addresses the needs of advanced grid operations and customer service teams with a distributed intelligence (DI) solution which is easy to deploy, integrate and operate. All in all, it is the first ever end-to-end solution in the market that provides high-resolution data from the edge of a utility’s distribution network at every endpoint.
To offer some context on what can this technology achieve, the solution is seemingly well-equipped to enhance grid capacity by as much as 20%.
Talk about the whole value proposition on a slightly deeper level, Itron’s Grid Edge Essentials brings to the fore several different benefits. For starters, we have the prospect of renewables integration, where users can come expecting real-time, autonomous visibility and local, standardized control of distributed energy resources. Furthermore, it represents those resources’ impact on the LV grid infrastructure.
Next up, there is the resiliency and reliability aspect, an aspect which translates to the potential for highly accurate and measured location awareness. This the solution achieves on the back of meter-to-phase, transformer, and feeder mapping.
“Building on our Grid Edge Intelligence portfolio launch earlier this year, Grid Edge Essentials streamlines the path to grid transformation for utilities, providing all of the necessary components to realize operational value now and forms the foundation for future services and use cases,” said Don Reeves, senior vice president of Outcomes. “Grid Edge Essentials is the first step in a utility’s journey to building an advanced, flexible and resilient grid that meets the needs of utility distribution grid operations and provides the utility’s customers with reliable energy.”
Grid Edge Essentials also preaches greater consumer access and engagement through more accurate load disaggregation, as well as through more actionable near real-time insights. Joining the mix here is the promise of carbon reduction. Here, the solution leverages that better renewable integration, while simultaneously deferring expensive grid upgrades, reducing need for expensive peak power, and maintaining optimized voltage levels (CVR).
Alongside the carbon content, Itron’s latest brainchild also cuts back on operating costs by banking upon predictable low voltage operation with accurate insights into metering and network operations. In essence, the core purpose of these insights will be to streamline operations, enhance preventive maintenance, and therefore, shrink down the costs.
Another detail worth a mention here is rooted in the solution’s bid to offer comprehensive data access. Using DataHub to do so, Grid Edge Essentials provides here a secure and consistent API access to curated data products and lifecycle data management. The idea here is to empower utilities to leverage more real-time, high-fidelity data across the utility enterprise. On top of that, DataHub also enables utilities and their customers to share data with authorized third parties.
Rounding up highlights is the technology’s open ecosystem, where the given solution allows for third-party application development by drawing from the DI developer program or curated APIs via the DataHub product. The stated development, on its part, accelerates innovation with a vibrant ecosystem.
Among other things, we ought to mention how Grid Edge Essentials is a bundled, comprehensive solution that pre-integrates multiple products, including DI Quick Start, Operations Optimizer (OO) Essentials, Consumer Engagement, Grid Edge Optimizer solution delivering DI applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Hosting, Delivery Services, and Intelligent Grid Edge Operation System.
