Microsoft and Itron help smart cities make use of the cloud
The collaboration brings together Itron’s energy management solutions and Microsoft’s cloud computing offerings to help cities and utilities reach their goals in areas such as grid resilience and decarbonisation.
Itron is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft in a bid to help more smart cities and utilities take advantage of cloud computing.
The collaboration brings together Itron’s energy management solutions and Microsoft’s cloud solutions to change how end-users view and manage their energy, and how utilities meet the demands of a rapidly changing industry.
Critical industry challenges
Itron is working with Microsoft to develop solutions that deliver insight and benefits for utilities and which help cities and enterprises reach their goals in areas such as grid resilience, consumer engagement, operational efficiency and decarbonisation.
The partners aim to address critical industry challenges, such as greenhouse gas emissions, carbon tracking, zero carbon goals, clean energy matching, data accessibility and operational insights. This includes network visibility, asset management, outage management and insights into electric vehicle (EV) and distributed energy resource loads that are essential to enabling a decarbonised grid.
“Our collaboration will provide analytics and data-sharing capabilities for utilities and cities, so they can optimise their operations and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy”
Integrated solutions will allow utilities to measure, report and accelerate the path to net zero for utilities and their customers. They will also be able to unlock additional value and data from their smart grid implementations, including new use cases such as location awareness, intelligent voltage monitoring, real-time transformer load monitoring, EV and solar awareness, active premise load shedding and more.
It will also enable data to be utilised at the edge of utilities’ and cities’ connected IoT platforms. Example use cases that will benefit from this data, analytics and integration include:
- utilities tracking towards net zero goals and engaging their customers around carbon management
- distributed energy resource providers identifying customers who can benefit from their products and customers who desire advanced energy solutions
- utilities improving demand side management, outage communication, outage prevention and outage management.
By increasing the number of cloud-ready solutions for the next-generation technology stack, the two companies hope to enable faster deployment, increase cost effectiveness, and enhance security and resilience. With Microsoft, Itron is also accelerating the extension of its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), data management and analytics solutions to the cloud in global markets.
The expanded collaboration will allow Itron to identify utility and city customers across the globe which can benefit from their existing solutions and reach global enterprises with critical energy and decarbonisation requirements. It will help more customers effectively shift operations into the cloud and take advantage of innovative and emerging solutions to meet critical operational, service and sustainability goals.
“As utilities begin to deploy edge compute-enabled connected IoT platforms, a new level of collaboration and co-innovation is needed”
“Expanding our collaboration with Microsoft is core to our commitment to delivering industry-leading solutions that make it easier for end-users to reduce their carbon footprint and conserve water,” said Don Reeves, senior vice president of outcomes at Itron. “Our collaboration will provide analytics and data-sharing capabilities for utilities and cities, so they can optimise their operations and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.”
“As utilities begin to deploy edge compute-enabled connected IoT platforms, a new level of collaboration and co-innovation is needed for the utilities to harvest the unprecedented opportunity for growth and creating value. With Microsoft’s advanced cloud technology combined with Itron’s industry expertise, we are optimising existing solutions and building new ones in an emerging and rapidly changing market.”
Darryl Willis, CVP worldwide energy industry, Microsoft, added: “The collaboration between Itron and Microsoft will enable utilities and smart cities to take advantage of cloud computing technology – in particular, edge computing – to accelerate cloud-native analytics, distribution automation, carbon reporting and provide an overall more flexible, scalable system that supports a distributed, resilient energy grid.”
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