Smart Energy

The energy and utilities industries are one of the most advanced and sophisticated users of Industrial IoT systems. With our urban population growing at an exponential pace and the need for alternate sources of energy rising, grids of the future will look very different. The next generation of Smart Grids will need to derive higher efficiency, reduce losses and integrate with newer sources of energy.

The smart grid is the only choice to integrate green power resources such as wind and solar into the energy distribution system, control power usage, and balance energy load. Smart grids augment capabilities of an existing power grid while adding a two-way communication network to continuously sense, analyze, pre-empt, and act upon potential uncertainties.

Smart grids employ smart meters which are responsible for two-way flows of electricity information to monitor and manage the electricity consumption. In a large smart grid, smart meters produce tremendous amount of data that are hard to process, analyze and store with cloud computing alone.

Edge computing solutions offer a place for collecting, computing and storing smart meter data before transmitting it to the cloud. This environment acts as a bridge in the middle of the smart grid and the cloud. It is geographically distributed and overhauls cloud computing via additional capabilities including reduced latency for more responsive grid control, increased privacy and locality for smart grids.

As part of an edge computing solution for a Smart Grid system, an open IoT edge computing platform such as IOTech’s Edge Xpert is a key to enabling features that make smart grids reliable, cost effective and easy to be deployed. This is achieved by enabling intelligent de-centralized control, simplified integration of distributed energy resources, resilience and fault-tolerance, hardware and OS independence to enable deployment flexibility, open managed platform APIs to support application sustainability and distributed edge intelligence to support smarter more responsive systems.

Back to the Industries Main Page