NEW UTILITY PLATFORM DELIVERS SMART ENERGY-AS-A-SERVICE
With corporate headquarters for Energy Future Holdings, Atmos Energy, and Oncor located in and around Dallas, North Texas is a hub for the energy utilities industry.
Today, many energy and utilities companies are challenged by maintaining aging infrastructure and meeting strict government regulations. To face these challenges while staying ahead of customer demand and keeping costs low, companies are increasingly looking to new technology to modernize their operations.
One of the ways energy and utilities companies are doing this is through implementing smart grid solutions. But building a smart utility infrastructure with powerful, reliable tools that connect and manage thousands of endpoints is complicated and costly. It often means investing in data centers, communication networks, and equipment, not to mention training and staffing a network management team.
Recently recognized by Frost & Sullivan with a North American Utility Grid Intelligence Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership Award, Verizon’s Grid Wide Utility Solution is a new Internet of Things (IoT) platform service offering utility companies an easy on ramp to grid modernization.
Grid Wide provides an integrated solution for smart metering, demand response, meter data management and distribution monitoring, and control. Designed to maximize the benefits of smart meters, the solution comes equipped with a wide-range of cloud-based applications intended to help utility companies reduce operating costs, increase efficiency, and improve customer experience.
By delivering smart energy as-a-service, Grid Wide offers more to utility companies than simply the ability to read their smart meters remotely. It turns the utility-owned meters into a power-quality sensor to help utility companies understand the quality of the electricity they are delivering to their customers.
With Grid Wide, the utility’s smart meter communicates its meter data over Verizon’s wireless network, through Verizon’s private network, and then to Verizon’s cloud environment. The solution’s pre-configured data and analytics dashboards provide timely information regarding outages and abnormal usage patterns while also helping utilities drive revenue.
As grid modernization projects are adopted, the importance of incorporating a fail proof cybersecurity program from the inception cannot be overstated. The energy and utilities sector handles vast amounts of proprietary customer data such as social security numbers, birth dates, bank account details, and credit card numbers.
This data, when combined with the critical mandate to protect national infrastructure from external threats, underscores the imperative for organizations to double down on security measures.
Utility companies can stay ahead of potential threats by adopting advanced security protocols and controls. At the backbone of it all is the nation’s largest and most reliable 4G LTE network, providing a secure connection to smart grid data and devices. Because the network is managed end-to-end by Verizon, utility and energy providers can focus on daily operations and customer experience.
To learn more about Verizon’s Smart Energy and Grid Wide Utility solutions, please visit http://www.verizonenterprise.com/industry/utility/index.xml
Illustration: cacaroot for istockphoto
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