Cisco Connected Grid Update

2012 was an exciting year for Cisco’s Connected Energy business.

Cisco entered the Smart Grid space 3 years ago and we have seen significant customer momentum.  We now have more than 250 customers worldwide. These include advanced metering infrastructure, substation and utility data center deployments in North America and wide area, substation, and distribution networks in Europe and Asia.  In 2012, we had over 175 production deployments and picked up the UTC Best Smart Grid Products/Solutions for FAN and Substation as well as the Frost & Sullivan innovations awards. Our Connected Grid Cisco Developer Network of partners continues to grow as well and we will be announcing more members in the coming months.  

Last Wednesday we announced an expansion of the Connected Grid Portfolio. The new offerings include the Cisco® Utility Operational Network solution, Cisco Connected Grid Design Suite, and Cisco Incident Response and Workforce Enablement solution. These three new solutions will help utilities modernize, manage, and improve everyday grid operations.

All of this ties together with Cisco’s vision for the Internet of Everything. The network will be a crucial part for utilities to improve communication, enabling devices, and intelligent data which triggers smarter and more efficient decisions in the operations and management portion of the grid.

I would also like to highlight some customer  successes and how they are using our new solutions.

SCANA Corporation is an energy based holding company serving electric customers in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. SCANA has a number of two way radio systems that range from low to high band, digital to analog and trunked to individual channels. For years interoperability was just not practical for SCANA. Cisco’s IPICS solution allowed SCANA to obtain interoperability across regions and systems,. These options were unique because it allowed them to scale as large as necessary but still be affordable during the early stages of a deployment.

Western Power Distribution (WPD) is an electricity distribution network operator serving over 7.7 million customers  in the UK. Cisco participated in WPD’s grid modernization efforts called project FALCON. Project FALCON pilots a communications network across over 200 substations to improve load forecasting for 11kV electrical networks, and provide real-time grid information dynamic asset rating, automatic load transfer, meshed grids and energy storage. Take a look at a clip from WPD.

State Grid Corporation of China delivers power to over 80% of China. A digital substation footprint this large leads to complexities in deploying and configuring integrated electrical and communications networks.  With the Cisco Connected Grid Design Suite, State Grid of China was able to reduce deployment time, and cost of ongoing maintenance.

Southern California Edison is one of the largest utilities in the US and provides power to over 14 million people . As part of their Centralized Remedial Action Scheme (CRAS) project for wide area protection of the electrical grid they are deploying Cisco’s utility operational network. CRAS will enable fast and automated control actions, utilizing relays and telecom network, to ensure acceptable power system performance following critical outages.

We are looking forward to announcing more customers in the next few months so please stay tuned.

The Connected Energy Networks team will be in San Diego this week for the Distributech convention, booth 3314, so please come by and say hello. We hope to see you there.

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