Energy used to flow one way down the value chain. Power plants generated power, high-voltage lines transmitted it to your neighborhood substations, and wires from poles brought it home. All of this happened behind a meter, with consumers only ever engaging when using electricity or paying a utility bill. They knew nothing of how they got their energy let alone do anything about it. However, this is beginning to change.
Communication is a core component of any smart-grid or AMI implementation. Depending on application use cases, geography, rural/urban areas or existing infrastructure however, a grid operator may choose PLC, mesh or cellular communications. With an increasingly diverse and active consumer base that now includes prosumers, electric vehicle charging, renewables and more, how can utilities ensure that all these segments are served without disrupting their AMI?
Power and quality. Should be familiar words to all of us. But why have I written them here like this, together? Is there something special about them? According to surveys, the cost of poor power quality is over 150 billion euros a year to European business. So, power quality may not be your core business, but your core business is affected by power quality.
In the past two years, the transformation of the energy industry has accelerated. We caught up with Bodo Zeug, Executive Vice President and Head of Landis+Gyr EMEA, and discussed with him about the megatrends in the energy sector, how they affect utilities and how Landis+Gyr intends to support utilities in tackling current and upcoming challenges.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are seeing tremendous adoption globally and will play a significant role in a distributed energy system and in the transition to a net zero society. Recognizing that EVs represent both challenges and opportunities for utilities, Landis+Gyr acquired two companies in the EV charging space: Etrel and True Energy. With these acquisitions, we expand our offering to utilities through EV charging hardware and smart charging software, including demand response and flexibility management to better manage the grid.
In its working paper "Critical Vulnerability in Log4j - Detection and Response", the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) underlines the persistent and complex danger of the Log4Shell vulnerability in industrial networks as well. Patching the vulnerability in the short to medium term is considered unrealistic for many companies. For this reason, the BSI recommends continuous monitoring and analysis of network communication via anomaly detection in addition to rule-based query analysis. Industrial anomaly detection solutions, as offered by Rhebo, a Landis+Gyr Company, enable companies to detect on compromises that have already occurred, active exploits and other malicious activities in the operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICS) at an early stage. The vulnerability, documented as CVE-2021-44228, allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on systems using the widespread Log4j library without authentication.
