With NeXtworking, utilities are able to drive more reliable, safer, and cleaner power.
Your grid modernization begins with an Enterprise PMN.
Improve situational awareness and enable more reliable, safer, and cleaner power with an Enterprise Private Mobile Network – powered by Expeto.
Utilities experience pressure to optimize reliability and improve grid stability by dynamically balancing more real-time supply with demand. The inclusion of intermittent sources of renewable power across a grid that in many areas is approaching 150 years in age requires technological upgrades in the communication and data infrastructure.
Data is the new currency of the grid. Operators are hungry to drive more operational awareness and better decisions that ultimately will improve reliability and deliver a better, safer customer experience.
The grid is becoming “smarter” thanks to innovative devices — meters, transformers, sensors, reclosers, switches, and substations — but the communications driving these smart devices can be proprietary, expensive, unreliable, and complex to support. Automation applications such as Fault Location Isolation and Restoration (FLISR) and wildfire prevention require not just smarter devices but high-density, high-bandwidth, and low-latency networks that can make compute decisions at the edge.
Power up with Expeto.
That is why utilities require a Private Mobile Network (PMN). A PMN is as easy to get up and running as traditional Wi-Fi, yet more affordable. It provides the much-needed real-time latency, high bandwidth, and high device density needed to scale to the thousands of devices and data points required to drive home the future of automation in utility applications.
An Expeto PMN is different because it allows utilities to develop and support their own wireless networks on their own terms – open to any G, any radio network, any cloud – whether needed remote, on-premises, or at the edge — but always secured behind their firewall. These networks become an extension of a utility’s highly secure corporate WAN, and their enterprise security policy remains unchanged so they retain full control of their own data and devices.
Recognizing this, utilities are turning to an Expeto PMN to connect applications and devices that monitor, control, and automate grid functions without compromising reliability or security.
Expeto helps Operators improve outcomes.
Renewables & Decarbonization
Renewables such as photovoltaic (PV) solar farms, rooftop solar panels, electric vehicles (EV), wind power, and distributed energy resources (DERs) can cause major grid chaos for utilities. Quick response to power surges requires real-time situational awareness only available in upgraded wireless communications infrastructures.
Reliability and Outage Management
There has been a 67% increase in major power outages from weather-related events since 2000. Outage Management System (OMS) and Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) software are rendered useless without real-time, highly accurate grid data.
Asset Management and Preventative Maintenance
At 150 years old, many assets that make up the grid have well exceeded their useful life and are failing (or are in danger of doing so) when tasked with the grid’s new demands. Utilities need affordable ways to collect the data needed to manage assets before they cause a violent failure, blackout, or wildfire.
New Risks for Crew Safety
In the service of their customers, crews literally put their lives on the line during restoration efforts. Workers must rely on reliable, real-time information that indicates if circuits are energized or de-energized in a high-stakes environment.