Underground, overground... wirelessly free - tracking the smart grid

Power plants and end-user buildings aren’t the only spots where utilities need to monitor energy flow and quality for reliable electricity service. The more electric companies know about what’s happening at points throughout the transmission and distribution systems, the smarter and more secure they can make the grid.

Wireless communications, in particular, enable all sorts of new grid monitoring possibilities. Among the latest entries into that marketplace are On-Ramp Wireless and GridSense, which are teaming up to provide utilities with a new secure system for distribution network monitoring.

The system combines GridSense’s TransformerIQ platform with On-Ramp’s Ultra-Link Processing (ULP) system to enable utilities to monitor their distribution assets, detect faults and power quality issues and even identify instances of power theft. The wireless system also acts as a hub for demand-side load management.

“Together we will enable monitoring on below-ground transformers, without external antennas, which have previously been unreachable by wireless technology,” said Joaquin Silva, president and CEO of On-Ramp.

On-Ramp and GridSense plan to jointly pilot the Smart Transformer monitoring solution starting this spring.

Electric utilities need a low-cost, high-capacity network to effectively monitor their distribution transformer fleet, and On-Ramp says its ULP system can support 20,000 TransformerIQ monitors per Access Point. According to the company, this provides capacity to spare for other distribution automation applications, and to securely deliver transformer data to a utility’s back office systems.

The demand for distribution asset management will only keep rising as electric vehicles and charging stations are deployed at more and more homes and other locations, adding additional load to the current infrastructure, according to GridSense.

“By partnering with On-Ramp, we are able to provide utilities with next-generation ‘smart-enabled’ transformers capable of providing access to a large network of assets,” said Lindon Shiao, CEO of GridSense. “Without this information, they risk their reliability standards and their customers’ satisfaction.”