CURRENT has released a comprehensive Smart Grid portfolio, called CURRENT Smart Transformer Station, designed to solve distribution and metering challenges in European, Australian and Asia Pacific-based utility grid architectures.

 

Company officials said that the “Smart Transformer Station” is a flexible, open and cost-effective suite of products to solve “real-world smart grid problems facing utilities worldwide.” This newest portfolio focuses on addressing four main ingredients of comprehensive Smart Grid deployments – communications, sensing and analytics, metering and device, data and event management.

 

The new solution allows for low-cost robust communications to and within primary and secondary transformer stations via a modular, secure, upgradeable communications gateway solution.

 

It also provides transparency to grid-asset conditions through cost-effective, easy-to-deploy, remotely managed sensing solutions. Additionally, CURRENT Smart Transformer Station addresses meter communications and collection capabilities through fully open and interoperable meter concentrator solutions.

 

Company officials said that it also provides user-based remote visibility into all aspects of Smart Grid operations via software systems tailored specifically to utility networking/ telecom, distribution engineering and customer related personnel.

In addition to hardware infrastructure, the CURRENT Smart Transformer Station solution consists of supporting software systems targeted at solving the connectivity, transparency and metering challenges.

 

Company officials said that the communications and connectivity component of the Smart Transformer Station is accomplished through the CURRENT Communication and Connectivity Engine (CCE). For large primary or secondary transformation stations, CCE provides an IP-based, remotely managed, modular, card-based infrastructure platform.

 

Also, the CURRENT Smart Transformer Station portfolio provides sensing capabilities for the direct measurement, edge analysis, and event alarming of primary and secondary feeder operating parameters. Moreover, this solution portfolio is rounded out with the CURRENT Station Data Concentrator (SDC) portfolio Transformer Station solutions.

 

Tom Willie, senior vice president of products and technology at CURRENT, noted that utilities have recognized that there are challenges in operating a distribution network in an environment of aging infrastructure, retiring workforces, centralized and distributed renewable energy sources, and increased desire from customers to have visibility into their energy consumption.

 

That these challenges will require them to invest in solutions that provide for “greater connectivity and control over grid devices, greater transparency into grid conditions, and greater responsiveness in communicating and providing information to their end users of electricity,” he said, adding that the CURRENT STS solution is tailored to “specifically provide utilities with a solution to these expanding challenges.”