According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, major U.S. electric utilities spend $51 billion annually on electricity distribution systems, largely to upgrade aging equipment on their distribution system and to install smart meters. These investments are part of a broader trend toward a national smart grid that leverages new technologies to optimize electrical grid performance and minimize downtime.
A recent survey published by SAS of some 200 U.S. utilities dives deeper into the progress toward an autonomous grid, looking specifically at the use of industrial internet of things (IIoT) technologies and machine learning to aid the transition to a smart grid. The survey found that 43 percent of utilities are already using IoT for outage management, while another 24 percent plan to use it within the next three years. The utilities already using IoT report the technology helps them:
- Identify outages faster and sometimes predict them before they happen;
- Prevent outages from happening at all or fix them faster than before; and,
- Reduce downtime and improve reliability at a lower cost.
The Machfu Gateway allows electric utilities to connect a smart network of outage detecting sensors to existing SCADA systems. Utilities have the option to connect to a private SCADA radio over a serial or ethernet port, or with the embedded LTE cellular radio. This solution also connects sensor data to cloud applications for providing web services thereby reducing maintenance costs and enabling predictive analytics.