Verizon, CURRENT take guesswork out of the smart grid

Seeing an opportunity to unburden utilities from building specialized networks for their smart grid needs, Verizon has launched a joint initiative with electric sensor vendor CURRENT to offer utilities an IP-based smart grid service.

This joint service will enable electric utilities to gain real-time power consumption and analysis communications between electric companies and sensors deployed on their networks. Through the new partnership, Verizon will offer up its suite of necessary wireless and IP network services, managed network and security service and advanced IT security consulting. In tandem with Verizon, CURRENT will provide its intelligence sensors to monitor electric distribution grid performance as well as its OpenGrid EMS and analytical software elements.

One of the benefits for utilities, as described by Bob Heffron, utility market manager for Verizon Business in an interview with LightReading, is that they will be able to better identify where energy is being lost because of a faulty element in the grid. The service effectively empowers the utility to be more proactive about finding elements that might need to be either fixed or replaced before a power failure occurs.

And if an outage does happen, the utility can "be more specific as to where I dispatch a crew so I can fix it much faster," Heffron said.

For more:
- see the release here [1]
- LightReading also has this article [2]

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