Power Monitoring

Smart power monitoring solutions are transforming the way that electrical utilities distribute and manage energy. The country’s power grid is pushed to capacity, and local governments are continually seeking new technologies that can help to deliver electricity more affordably and reliably. Smart grid solutions can help in this effort, using data and analytics to manage supply and demand more efficiently.

Smart grid technology enables continuous power monitoring by placing sensors throughout the electrical grid, collecting data on power lines, transformers and substations. Power monitoring technology can also measure the amount of energy that homes and businesses are consuming at any given moment, helping utility managers to monitor demand more carefully and to balance the load on the grid more effectively. With power monitoring technology that delivers constant visibility into the health, performance and capacity of the entire electrical system, utilities can do more with existing infrastructure while minimizing stress on the system.

Superior power monitoring requires several layers of technology:

• Internet of Things (IoT) sensors collect real-time data on weather conditions, temperature of power lines, faults in substations and levels of energy consumption in homes and businesses.
• A robust and reliable network connects thousands of sensors and transmits the real-time data they produce back to the utility with low latency.
• A platform for analytics turns mountains of raw data into valuable intelligence that provides grid managers with insight and triggers automated activity when necessary.
• A variety of user interfaces package data from power monitoring sensors and analytics software into formats that such as dashboards, maps and reports that can be quickly and easily read by grid managers.

Advantages of power monitoring solutions

Like all smart city solutions such as smart street lighting, smart parking systems and smart air pollution monitoring, smart power monitoring offers significant cost-savings and other benefits that include:

• Improving reliability of an aging electrical grid through better load-balancing.
• Distributing energy more efficiently by proactively monitoring power requirements during peak and off-peak times.
• Adding additional energy supply by enabling access to wind, solar and customer-owned power sources.
• Increasing security against cyber threats through continuous power monitoring of the electrical infrastructure.
• Restoring service quickly after disturbances and outages by routing power around trouble spots in the grid and by quickly pinpointing the source of issues.
• Enabling consumers to monitor their own power usage and to make more informed choices about energy consumption.
• Saving money by lowering the cost of operations.

By improving the efficiency of existing electrical infrastructure, power monitoring and other smart electricity solutions can also help cities to get more value from the current electrical grid and postpone the need for costly investment in new power infrastructure.

Spectrum Enterprise: connectivity solutions for power monitoring technology

As an industry-leading provider of fiber connectivity solutions for smart cities, Spectrum Enterprise delivers the network speed, bandwidth and reliability that power monitoring solutions require to connect and transmit data from thousands of sensors to the analytics platforms that will process it.

Spectrum has already laid the connectivity foundation for smart solutions in many urban areas, with a wholly owned fiber network that stretches more than 840,000 miles nationwide. With an additional $25 billion in additional capacity planned before 2021, Spectrum Enterprise is bringing high-speed connectivity to even more communities as they lay the groundwork for smart city infrastructure.

Because a smart power grid requires robust, high-speed connections, Spectrum Enterprise offers a two-way, fully interactive digital network with symmetrical connection speeds up to 100 Gbps for government and enterprise clients. Spectrum also provides gigabit connections to homes and businesses, enabling power monitoring technology within these facilities to communicate easily with utilities.  And to meet the needs of a smart grid system for diverse connection technologies, Spectrum offers WiFi connectivity as well as cellular connections through one of the largest LTE cellular networks in the nation.

Learn more about Spectrum Smart Cities at www.spectrumsmartcities.com.