Smart grid communications: Silicon Valley utility chooses RF Mesh with "headroom"

1

Quick Take: Earlier this year we told you about Sensus' private spectrum approach to smart grid communications, which offers, among other things, more headroom to go beyond simple meter reading. The announcement below demonstrates the same trend, as more and more utilities look for a multi-purpose network. Although Tropos uses a different approach than Sensus, it was selected by Silicon Valley Power for similar reasons. Notice, for instance, how the city plans to eventually use the same infrastructure for free citywide WiFi, advanced metering, distribution automation,  field force automation and more. – Jesse Berst

Silicon Valley Power has picked Tropos Network's GridComâ„¢ as its distribution area network for its smart grid program, SVP Meter Connect. SVP is the municipal electric utility for Santa Clara, California. The SVP smart grid includes Tropos' high performance mesh network for communications, AMI systems and integration services. The utility plans to use the Tropos network for more smart grid applications such as distribution automation and mobile workers. And later, the city expects to use the Tropos network to provide mobile access for city field workers, which would be less expensive than the city's current practice of using cellular cards. A primary goal of the SVP program is to enhance reliability of its distribution system. Power outages are estimated to cost financial and IT-based Silicon Valley companies $1 million per minute. The Meter Connect program also is expected to greatly reduce the time it takes to pinpoint outages, which will drastically cut response time for repair crews.The first phase of the project will be the rollout of the Tropos network and free WiFi access throughout the community in the first quarter of 2011. It will be followed by advanced meter installations for commercial and industry customers in the second quarter, and in 2012, a residential meter rollout will begin. Tropos also announced an agreement with metering and communications provider Elster in which Elster will resell Tropos' wireless regional area networking products.

You might also be interested in ...

Glendale Water and Power selects Tropos Gridcom for smart grid initiative

Avista selects Tropos GridCom network for Spokane smart grid project

Smart grid communications technologies

Stay connected with SGN …

Drop by our Smart Grid News Talk forums

Get LinkedIn with Jesse

Join Smart Grid News on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Try our RSS feed

Get our email digest