Insights Success The 10 Fastest Growing Utilities and Energy Solutions Provider Companies

CXO Standpoint
The Way of IOT’s, Smart Grid,
Smart City’s Future goes through
Technology and Network Convergence
In North America, utilities have
installed nearly 70 million smart
meters over the last decade. This
technology investment has delivered
tangible value to both utilities and
consumers. But utilities have yet to
realize the full potential of this
platform and the value of the data these
systems generate. This is primarily due
to common challenges that utilities as
well as technology providers have
struggled with:
• Smart meters are viewed mainly as a
cash registers and instruments of
customer billing rather than as
sophisticated sensors that provide a
rich source of data and insight to
improve grid operations.
• For the most part, smart metering
systems have been deployed in
technology “silos,” meaning they run
on purpose-built, largely proprietary
networks that were designed for
meter reading rather than on a
standards-based, multi-application
IP-platform.”
• These systems have created a relative
tsunami of new data-more frequent
and detailed usage data, event data
from power outages and voltage
anomalies and meter tamper alerts-
Jeff Carkhuff
32
|November 2016