IoT is a term that has been much in use over the last few years. Most people are familiar with the fact that it means one day your refrigerator might automatically order more milk when it is running low, but IoT potentially offers far more impressive applications in places such as the utility industry.
Four leading distribution system operators in Poland are joining forces to modernize their power grid.
In Europe-wide assessments of grid stability, Poland often scores below average, with a System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI), both significantly higher than the EU average. This means that Polish consumers lose their power supply more often than their European neighbors, and the total amount of time without power is longer.
Interview with Bill Lichtensteiger, Director of Communications Technology at Landis+Gyr.
Across the world, a new field of innovation is opening up, spurred by alliances between utility and technology companies, working with Internet of Things solutions that promise to profoundly change business practices, processes and delivery of services. Landis+Gyr is seeking ways to use IoT technologies to bring added benefits to the core business of utility companies and society as a whole.
IPv6 The key communication enabler for the Internet of Things
Internet Protocol Version 6 or IPv6 is an Internet addressing system developed by the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) to replace the IPv4 protocol. Development was primarily driven by address exhaustion, but in addition to offering a vastly increased number of unique addresses (an IPv6 address is 128 bits long, which allows for a total of approximately 3.4×1038 different addresses) there are a number of other important advantages, particularly in the field of utilities infrastructure.
Data management services and analytics are the key catalysts driving the Internet of Things innovations now being widely adopted by utilities to transform their operations and managerial capabilities.
Gridstream GWA (Gateway Administration), the smart metering solution by Landis+Gyr, has successfully passed one of the largest field tests in Germany to date. As part of this test, smart meters and smart meter gateways by various manufacturers were installed to more than 400 customers of EnBW and two other energy utilities in southwestern. The devices gather and transmit billing-relevant energy consumption data to their energy providers.
