Festival Hydro Deploying Advanced Grid Sensing Meters for System Modernization

Festival Hydro is deploying advanced grid sensing and metering technology as part of a distribution system modernization effort aimed at supporting future energy management capabilities.

The Stratford, Ontario–based utility is installing Landis+Gyr’s Revelo platform for its approximately 23,000 customers. The Revelo grid sensing meters operate on the Gridstream RF Mesh IP network and will replace the utility’s current advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system.

According to Festival Hydro, the deployment is part of a broader plan to prepare its distribution system for more flexible demand management and improved reliability.

“When we evaluated new AMI systems, our top priority was the ability to react to the opportunities we have today, while being able to address anticipated future technology needs,” said Bryon Hartung, vice president of engineering at Festival Hydro.

Once the deployment is complete, the utility plans to evaluate how the platform’s load disaggregation capabilities and other evolving features could be used to enhance customer energy insights and support future rate design and demand management strategies.

Festival Hydro also plans to integrate the system with its outage management platform. The integration is expected to improve outage response, support fault location detection and enhance customer communications, while reducing the number of truck rolls required for field operations.

“Festival Hydro is a great partner with a history of investing in infrastructure to improve reliability and power quality for their customers. As with many utilities, looming capacity constraints are top of mind and the move to Revelo provides the high-resolution data and real-time control necessary to maintain both reliability and affordability for their customers,” said David Chris, vice president of sales and marketing at Landis+Gyr.

Revelo is a next-generation grid sensing and metering platform that uses high-resolution waveform streaming to identify and monitor grid devices and system operations. The technology can support capabilities such as location awareness, transformer monitoring, voltage management and fault detection.

On the customer side, the platform can provide load disaggregation and situational awareness, enabling real-time energy usage information, smart switching and support for distributed energy resource (DER) integration.