Tropos Networks, Itron Inc. and KEMA have announced that Glenn Steiger, general manager of Glendale Water & Power, their mutual customer, has been recognized by GridWeek with the “Leadership in Smart Grid Deployment” award. The award is in recognition of GWP’s innovation and vision for the rollout of its smart grid program. The Leadership Award will be formally presented to Glenn Steiger, general manager of GWP, today, at a celebration hosted at GridWeek 2010 in Washington, D.C.
Steiger has established GWP’s smart grid initiative as a priority for all of the utility’s managers and employees. His unwavering support, extensive ongoing community outreach, presentations to foreign delegations and industry summits are the largest factors for success that distinguishes this project.
“It’s an honor to be recognized for the smart grid initiative I’ve initiated at Glendale Water & Power,” said Glenn Steiger. “We look forward to fulfilling our vision of Glendale’s smart grid – a power system which can automatically balance power supply and demand, conserve and optimize resources, reduce our carbon footprint, and reduce cost for our customers.”
Representing a $51 million smart grid implementation and partially funded by $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), GWP is deploying one of the most comprehensive smart grid projects in the country. GWP’s smart grid deployment will take place in phases starting with the rollout of smart power and water meters from Itron and a Tropos wireless distribution area network. Future phases will include demand response, power outage management and distribution automation.
The communications foundation for GWP’s smart grid is Tropos’ GridCom, which serves as the utility’s private wireless distribution area network providing reliability and performance as well as ubiquitous coverage across the 30 square miles of the utility’s service area. It is a foundation upon which GWP can scale to add additional smart grid applications as well as coverage area.
GWP’s smart grid program is powered by Itron’s end-to-end solution, consisting of OpenWay electricity meters, Water SaveSource endpoints and leak detection sensors and Itron Enterprise Edition (IEE) Meter Data Management (MDM) software. This unified platform delivers the many benefits of a smart grid, such as detailed usage data, a connected home, and service connection convenience, to GWP and its customers.
KEMA, a leading energy consulting, testing, and certification firm, is overseeing the roll out of GWP’s Smart Grid Initiative. KEMA is providing impartial project management of the multi-vendor system integration and deployment to ensure GWP customers realize benefits from the technology quickly and seamlessly. KEMA also assisted GWP in its successful application for U.S. DOE AMI-Smart Grid grant funding to help implement the AMI / MDMS project and smart grid development.
