March 2021
Member Spotlight
In 2021, SECC will be recognizing a member each month, providing an organizational profile and highlighting the member's accomplishments and output in the smart energy space.
About Itron
Itron enables utilities and cities to safely, securely and reliably deliver critical infrastructure solutions to communities in more than 100 countries. Itron’s portfolio of smart networks, software, services, meters and sensors helps their customers better manage electricity, gas and water resources for the people they serve. By working with customers to ensure their success, Itron helps improve the quality of life, ensure the safety and promote the well-being of millions of people around the globe. Itron is dedicated to creating a more resourceful world.
Itron has decades of experience, delivering innovative, secure solutions for utilities and cities to more than 8,000 customers in over 100 countries. The company’s devices, networks, software and services have all been proven at scale—in some of the least hospitable environments on earth. Itron’s vast partner ecosystem ensures you always have the broadest avenue to innovation.
Delivering Proven Results
Understanding the challenges and complexity of modernizing critical infrastructure, Itron offers broad and deep domain expertise with complete, end-to-end solutions and services for any environment.
Using Itron solutions, customers are able to:
- Better serve customers and communities with efficient, personalized services.
- Drive down costs by eliminating redundancies in inefficiencies in service delivery.
- Improve resourcefulness by eliminating waste.
- Deliver new services and revenue opportunities by cost-effectively sharing the same intelligent infrastructure with other local utilities and municipalities to deliver more services and applications to customers.
- Build toward a reliable, secure and connected future where a smart network supports a multitude of services and a wide variety of affordable, flexible devices built to work for decades.
- Exercise choice via a diverse offering of devices, components and connectivity – all based on open standards and all aimed at creating a future of opportunity for utilities and cities.
- Trust the industry leader known for delivering proven, foundational technology and solutions that scale to meet the needs of customers.
Intelligence that Empowers
New challenges for the utility industry are presented every day. Continued innovation has created a plethora of new and exciting opportunities for the utility industry in every commodity. For electricity, multi-directional power flows in the low voltage (LV) network, created by photovoltaics, electric vehicles, storage penetration and consumer service expectations have driven many changes in the utility market. These opportunities are a catalyst for new business models based on energy balancing, reactivity and customer focus. As a result, utilities need new tools to retain a position as a provider and enabler for energy consumers.
Meter-based distributed intelligence (DI) applications, delivered in conjunction with Itron’s industrial IoT network, enable new and innovative approaches to solving critical challenges facing the world’s power grids and transforming utility consumer engagement. DI applications provide significant improvements to outage detection and analysis, distribution connectivity modeling, fault detection, theft detection, transformer load management, renewables integration, electric vehicle integration and multiple innovative consumer services.
Distributed intelligence allows forward-looking utilities to evolve new business models. This facilitates future planning to align with their customers’ needs and the changing market driving their business model. Delivering key information to the right place and at the right time will improve grid efficiency, reliability and safety, improve customer service and decrease operational costs. Insight, innovation, enablement and trust will be the pillars for utilities to succeed in navigating the new business models. Itron’s distributed intelligence applications empower the business transformation necessary for utilities to succeed and be in the know about their customers and their grid.
Intelligence in Action: Methane Detection on Itron’s IoT Network
To increase safety for natural gas utilities, Itron, New Cosmos and Con Edison collaborated to integrate New Cosmos’ battery-powered methane detectors on Itron’s IoT platform through the Itron developer program. With these devices on Itron’s secure, standards-based industrial IoT platform, utilities can detect natural gas leaks and quickly alert emergency crews to improve safety in the communities they serve. The detector sounds an audible alarm to immediately alert anyone nearby if it detects natural gas in the atmosphere where the device is installed. In the case of a leak, the device will also immediately communicate with the utility, which will respond with a crew and notify the local fire department.
