Smart Grid IoT

Smart grid IoT solutions are transforming the way governments and utilities are managing power needs in the 21st century. As our nation’s aging power grid reaches the limits of its capacity, smart grid solutions are helping utilities to make more effective use of existing infrastructure, rather than investing heavily in costly new power plants.

Smart grid IoT systems enable continuous power monitoring by placing Internet of Things sensors, or IoT sensors, throughout the power grid. These devices measure everything from the temperature and capacity of powerlines and the health of transformers to potential faults in substations and energy consumption within homes and businesses. Together, all these smart grid IoT devices and smart meters provide utility managers with unprecedented insight into the health and performance of the electrical grid. When issues arise, grid managers can pinpoint the trouble immediately, without needing to send a repair crew out to inspect the wires. With real-time data about energy usage, utilities can offer consumers incentives to shift high-consumption activities to off-peak times. And by better balancing supply and demand, utilities can reduce the stress on the decades-old power grid.

Other benefits of smart grid IoT technology include:

• Lower costs. By making management of the grid more efficient, smart grid IoT systems help to reduce the cost of distributing energy, creating savings that can be passed on to consumers.
• Improved security. Smart grid IoT sensors can help to identify physical and cyber threats to the grid more quickly, enabling utilities to stop attacks sooner.
• Faster restoration. When power is interrupted by disturbances or outages, grid managers can pinpoint the issue quickly for faster resolution, and route electricity around the problem in the system to ensure a continuous supply of energy.
• Increased supply. Smart electrical grids make it easier to include energy from renewable sources like wind and solar as well as customer-owned power generation sources.

The infrastructure required for smart grid IoT solutions

To take advantage of the thousands of smart grid IoT sensors deployed throughout a power grid, utilities must deploy a technology stack that includes:

• A high-performance network. Smart grid IoT devices produce mountains of real-time data that must be reliably transmitted to the utility with low latency. A high-performance, high-bandwidth network is essential to ensure that utilities get quality data quickly.
• An analytics platform. All the data produced by smart electricity technology must be collected, aggregated, analyzed and packaged into actionable intelligence by a powerful analytics platform.
• Intelligent user interfaces. To provide utility managers with actionable intelligence, the data from smart grid IoT sensors must be interpreted through intelligent interfaces such as dashboards, maps and reports that quickly pinpoint issues and identify solutions.

While no single vendor can provide all the infrastructure that a smart grid IoT system requires, local governments are wise to look for technology partners that offer a single vendor ecosystem that can reduce the cost and simplify the complexity of deploying smart technology throughout the grid.

Spectrum Enterprise delivers smart grid IoT connectivity – and more

With more than 840,000 miles of a wholly owned fiber network that spans the nation, Spectrum Enterprise delivers connectivity solutions to local governments and utilities throughout the United States. Spectrum is currently a partner to many communities implementing smart solutions and is investing an additional $25 billion by 2021 to add capacity and network capabilities to even more communities.

Spectrum has also built relationships with a variety of smart technology providers to offer cities and utilities a comprehensive solution for deploying smart energy systems, as well as other smart solutions like smart parking, smart streetlights and smart temperature monitoring.

To support the connectivity needs of a smart grid IoT solution, Spectrum Enterprise offers:

• A two-away, fully interactive digital network.
• 100 Gbps symmetrical connection speeds for government and enterprise clients.
• Gigabit connections for homes and businesses.
• One of the largest LTE cellular networks in the nation.
• Over 350,000 WiFi hotspots nationwide that will soon provide wireless connectivity at 1 Gbps.

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