Dominion, a Virginia-based energy company,
announced that it has invested $3 million in
Power Tagging Technologies, a Colorado-based developer of smart grid technology for digitally tagging electric power and attached devices.
In addition to the investment aspect of the partnership, both companies will also work together on commercial deployments in areas such as real-time grid mapping, fault isolation, electric vehicle integration and grid cyber security, according to company sources.
Power Tagging was recently
awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation. The grant allows the company to accelerate the growth of its eGRID database development that provides the intelligence hub for all its deployments, the company said.
The driving force for the Dominion’s investment in Power Tagging is the ability to deliver intelligence to the grid in a proven, cost-effective and readily deployable manner, according to company officials. They said Power Tagging’s technology can give power to smart grids at a fraction of the cost of existing technologies.
By investing in Power Tagging’s technology, Dominion expects “to measure, trace and audit the flow of electricity on the smart grid in effect, to ‘tag’ it and follow it with a technology that is embedded in the power grid itself rather than on a parallel communications network,” said Mary C. Doswell, senior vice president for alternative energy solutions at Dominion.
With this power-tagging technology, utilities would know immediately about changes in electrical flow on the circuit between a customer’s home or business and the neighborhood substation, pinpoint problems and needed repairs, and manage specific consumer electricity demand, according to Dominion officials.
According to Doswell, the technology should improve the flow of information and help provide cost and environmental benefits.
Learn more about Smart Grid technology at the Smart Grid Summit, an event collocated with ITEXPO East 2010, to be held Jan. 20 to 22 in Miami. This is the event you need to attend if you want to understand the role that IP communications technologies will play in how the Smart Grid evolves – not just for making utilities more efficient, but also for enabling the Smart Home and a new generation of communications innovations. Register now. Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for IoTevolutionworld. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Marisa Torrieri