The State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) has selected Nokia optical transport to bring massive scale, security and agility to the nation’s power grid.

Finland-based Nokia has extended its existing relationship with the world’s largest power utility as SGCC has chosen its OTN optical transport network to be deployed across Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, creating an OTN backbone with the capacity, operational efficiency and intelligence required to support the Chinese power grid and provide reliable service to its broad customer base.

SGCC supplies electrical power to more than 1.1 billion people across 26 provinces, covering 88% of Chinese national territory. As power utilities such as SGCC adopt the IoT in the creation of smart grids, both bandwidth and complexity increase.

The Nokia technology, which includes its family of 1830 PSS-x photonic service switches, helps SGCC swiftly transition to a reality that improves overall reliability of the power grid and achieves a significant reduction in daily operating costs.

Through automation, the utility can monitor electrical power production and distribution status in real time, using IoT sensors throughout its infrastructure. SGCC can also harness new energy sources such as solar, water and wind by connecting and monitoring these energy generation and storage systems across its wide geography.

With a small footprint and low power consumption, the portfolio’s design plays a critical role in realising China’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2060. The Nokia optical transport portfolio provides scalable WDM capabilities from 100G to 600G per wavelengths, which eliminates the need for costly, disruptive replacements and reduces product waste.

“Nokia has one of the most agile and efficient optical transport networks available today,” said Markus Bochert, president of Nokia in China. “With this mission-critical network, the State Grid Corporation of China now has the flexibility to transition beyond 100G when and how it chooses, leveraging unmatched operational and environmental efficiencies as it automates and modernises across its geographies.”

Nokia has deployed mission-critical networks to more than 2200 enterprise customers in the transport, energy, large enterprise, manufacturing, webscale and public sector segments around the globe. It has also extended its expertise to more than 515 large private wireless users worldwide across an array of sectors.