LiveData Utilities has announced an innovation partnership with Space-Time Insight to bring new reliability and potential business opportunities to smart grid utilities.
The companies are collaborating to develop services and solutions for electric utilities, calling on each company’s unique and discrete innovations. LiveData Utilities offers operational intelligence data integration for the Smart Grid; Space-Time Insight offers situational intelligence software for asset-intensive industries.
The first offering from this collaboration delivers an end-to-end, on-demand analytics solution for utilities to control distributed energy resources (DERs) and other devices, manage grid automation systems and devices, and generate operational insights. The joint solution enables utilities to take advantage of the growth opportunities presented by DERs and demand shaping, and achieve a deeper, more personalized relationship with customers.
Powerful forces are reshaping the utility distribution grid, including
- growing use of residential solar power, energy efficiency and energy storage
- accelerating data volumes and velocities
- financial and regulatory pressures to reduce CapEx and implement new business models
The proliferation of DERs and changing regulations are pushing electric utilities to become distribution services providers that balance local supply and demand among many different generators and users.
The joint solution comprises existing offerings from the respective companies and is designed to offer the quickest integration time across even the most complex array of grid operation assets:
- The RTI Platform from LiveData Utilities, a back-end and OT middleware dataflow engine, enables device control and real-time data collection and transformation.
- Distribution Intelligence from Space-Time Insight helps utilities make the transition to a distribution service provider. The application incorporates advanced analytics and intuitive visualizations that provide the context needed to develop new business models and revenue streams based on distribution.
“Utilities need new ways to adapt to DERs that cause large swings in transformer loading and voltage levels and threaten the stability of the network delivery of power,” said Ajay Madwesh, Vice President of Utilities IBU and Solutions at Space-Time Insight. “The more unreliable service becomes, the more a utility’s customers are motivated to defect to either competitive power suppliers or to generating their own power.”
The two companies recently demonstrated the integrated solution at the 2016 DistribuTECH conference. The demonstration showed the companies’ combined ability to exercise on-demand device control while integrating a full range of IT, OT, external, and IoT data sources.
“There is a strong interest among smart grid utilities to expand the depth of their intelligence platform. The partnership between LiveData Utilities and Space-Time Insight enables the fusion of world-class analytics software with a powerful OT dataflow engine, making an intelligent, end-to-end Distribution Automation control solution possible,” said LiveData Utilities General Manager, Brad Harkavy.
The new on-demand analytics solution is expected to pave the way to other innovations, services and solutions for electric utilities world-wide.
