“…Arcadian Networks has created an offering that can have an immediate and significant impact for Great River Energy and regional entities with similar needs.” — David Saggau, CEO, Great River Energy
Who benefits from a Smart Grid? Everyone.
Consumers
- Less expensive electricity
- Higher reliability of service
- Faster outage management
- Greener environment
- Improved control and consumption choices
Customer Service
- More accurate meter reading and billing
- Less call-backs through better availability and billing information
- Identification and elimination of energy theft
- Elimination of estimates rather than actual reads
Distribution
- Reduce windshield time/remote turn on/turn off of service
- More efficient and effective deployment of field resources
- Reduce O&M, personnel and truck-roll costs
- Faster outage recovery
- Improved performance in meeting customer commitments leading to improved customer satisfaction
- Smarter and less expensive energy purchases
Generation and Transmission
- Cost effectively manage quality of feedstock as it affects efficiency and emissions
- More reliable dispatching of generation, regulation services, and distributed generation
- Faster outage recovery
- More efficient and effective deployment of field resources
- Higher resilience and recovery of grid assets
- Basis for better operations decision making
- Reduction in transmission congestion costs
Engineering
- Reduce the time and effort to design and install new SCADA and RTU equipment at transmission and distribution substations and devices
- Improved performance in accuracy, cost and timeliness of designs for new customer facilities
- More accurate load forecasting capabilities enabling planning process to more accurately identify needed system reinforcements
- Improvements in design enabled by intelligent devices and availability of asset information
IT / Administration
- Single, uniform, standardized and consolidated network infrastructure
- TCP/IP open-standards based
- Large ecosystem of equipment providers
- Extraordinary wireless propagation minimizes required equipment, interference and cost, maximizes reach and bandwidth
- Access to skills and expertise
- More accurate activity-based cost management of field assets and operations
- Secure, licensed, private spectrum at national economies of scale
- Automate broadcasting firmware updates to meters
- Changes in tariffs
- Improvements in metering algorithms
- Can save 10,000 man-hours a year for a 500,000 meter utility
- Managed network operations center (NOC) with 24 x 7 oversight
- Basis for better infrastructure decision making
- Secure, reliable, low-risk approach