Smart grid insider: S&C Electric snags grid optimization tools from Current Group

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By Jesse Berst

I breathed a sigh of relief when Mike Edmonds called to give me a sneak preview of the acquisition S&C Electric is announcing today. Relief because S&C is picking up some very cool smart grid technology that deserves more visibility than it was getting under its previous ownership, the Current Group.

I will fill you in on the purchase, and then explain how it fits into S&C's smart grid strategy overall. If you're not familiar with the company, you may want to review my piece about the distribution automation gold rush and S&C's prospects.

In brief, there are four parts to the S&C story:

1.     Grid reliability (the company's self-healing technologies)

2.     Grid communications (its low-latency, high-bandwidth radios)

3.     Grid capacity (storage and power electronics)

4.     Grid efficiency (the new optimization tools from Current)

Next-generation voltage optimization

Old-school volt/VAR optimization is based on a model – an estimation of the network's state. Newer approaches – like the one S&C just purchased – are based on real-time information. Mike Edmonds, who is VP of Strategic Solutions at Chicago-based S&C Electric, has a background in centralized EMS/DMS systems. He is very familiar with the limitations of the traditional approach.

Mike is especially excited about the chance to adapt the newly purchased technology to S&C's "hybrid" approach to distribution automation. Traditional EMS/DMS systems take a centralized approach. S&C originally pioneered a different, distributed approach, with intelligence at the edges. (It's IntelliRupter automatic circuit reclosers are is a prime example, taking action on their own based on local conditions.)

But now S&C is on a mission to get the best of both worlds. Their hybrid approach takes the big picture into account to change the parameters at the local level. You can think of it as local self-healing followed by centralized optimization. (If communications go down, the local equipment still operates on its own.)

Voltage and grid optimization have been getting lots of attention lately, as we highlighted recently in our grid optimization toolkit. Yet few utilities are actually doing anything about it. S&C's new stuff is already on the ground at four projects in North America. Two of them – ComEd and Xcel (SmartGridCity) – have been publicly announced.

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