Smart grid technology offers many benefits to utilities and consumers alike, mostly found in energy efficiency on the electricity grid and in the energy users’ homes and offices.

TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) recently interviewed Denise Barton, vice president of marketing of Tropos Networks, which builds wireless broadband networks for smart grid communications. Barton and Tehrani talked about current and future trends in smart grid technology and Tropos’ role in its growth.

“As we all know, there are multiple layers of communications within the smart grid, but basically we sit across the distribution area and aggregate communications for many different applications – AMI, distribution automation, sub-station security,” explained Barton. “What we’re finding with utilities is that instead of continuing to build networks for all of these separate applications, we’re offering them an economical solution that is high performance in which they can aggregate their communications over a single network infrastructure.”

With the emergence of the smart grid, Tropos has increased its market focus to provide its technology and services to power utilities for aggregating communications for a wide range of smart grid applications. As such, Tropos Networks (News - Alert) is also heavily involved in metering.

According to Barton, the company recently partnered with Itron and Elster to provide customers with its backhaul.

“Itron actually resells our network under the Open Wave brand and offers that to their customers so we sit in there very closely with them and provide the backhaul for those AMI networks,” she explained.

In discussing current trends, Barton said that utilities using advanced metering infrastructure are beginning to look to more sophisticated solutions, including automation.

“Many utilities that started with AMI are now starting to look at other applications which are placing much higher demands on the network itself such as distribution automation. Some of those applications require both high performance and low latency, unlike AMI many utilities started with which you can get by with a relatively low bandwidth type of solution,” Barton said. “So we’re starting to see utilities really understand that for smart grid, they need to be looking at communications as a very strategic part of their decision-making so that the make the right decisions going forward to buy a network that will take them a long way in terms of being able to add multiple applications over time.”

The United States’ government investment in the smart grid has stimulated growth in this sector, Barton noted, with utilities now moving onto the implementation phase of the projects funded by the stimulus funding.

“We all saw this great hit and lots of projects and a lot of activity underway, and as you know so many of those utilities wanted to get started right away with their projects since they had a limited amount of time to spend those funds,” Barton said. “Many of those projects that were funded were for metering, however some included other applications. We saw a lot of activity and now we see utilities in an implementation mode right now where they’re implementing a lot of those projects.”

Overseas, Barton said that smart grid growth is occurring abroad, noting that one of the company’s largest utility installations in Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

“They’ve deployed a Tropos network for wireless communications for both power and water meters. They’re now adding other applications such as distribution automation even traffic controllers using that same infrastructure. It spans about 3,000 square miles and today is supporting 1.5 million meters. It’s a very broad network,” Barton said.

Looking ahead, Barton said there is huge growth potential in the smart grid. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has more than 800 customers around the world in 30 countries. In addition, Tropos has been awarded 30 patents for its wireless network technologies and has an additional 30 pending.