Trilliant and Sense improve utility energy management

  • October 9, 2024
  • Steve Rogerson

US companies Trilliant, a provider of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and Sense, a specialist in embedded intelligence that transforms the relationship between people, homes and the grid, are helping utilities deploy edge analytics at scale.

North Carolina-based Trilliant will embed Sense’s grid edge technology into its AMI metering, driving efficiency and edge analytics for utilities and consumers. This integration should unlock up to 1MHz sampling to process nearly one billion times the amount of data currently available in the 15-minute interval data from first-generation smart meters.

Using this high-resolution waveform data, Sense software, via smart meters, can identify household devices based on their electrical signatures and can integrate with other smart home devices for enhanced control and automation. As a result, consumers can monitor, track and increase their knowledge about energy consumption in real time, gain a deeper understanding of electricity expenses, and take the necessary steps to manage their usage.

The high-resolution data also enable the detection and localisation of anomalies on the grid, especially those near the home, an area where operators have traditionally lacked visibility.

“Sense’s technology enables utilities to empower consumers to better manage their energy use, and we’re excited about the impact this will have for our customers,” said Greg Myers, vice president at Trilliant. “Our partnership with Sense represents a natural progression of Trilliant’s Discover the Power of Choice value proposition. We go beyond hardware and remain focused on developing new technologies, applications and services and delivering them to the market. Trilliant is proud to partner with Sense to provide the enhanced ability to monitor and manage energy usage, via any meter.”

Sense CEO Mike Phillips added: “We see growing recognition across the industry that next-generation meters can play a key role in the energy transition. By including high resolution data, edge computing, and real-time networking, meters can go from being simple data collection devices to the distributed sensing, compute and control platform for the future grid. Trilliant is a natural strategic fit for Sense as a leading provider in the AMI space. By working together, we can bring these capabilities to a much broader set of utilities to enable both real-time consumer experiences and dramatically improved visibility of the grid. Our disaggregation and distributed intelligence technology is essential to energy consumption decision-making for both the utility and the consumer, and we’re excited to be working with Trilliant to continue to raise the bar on capabilities at the edge of the grid.”

Trilliant provides utilities with the freedom to choose the metering technology that best meets the requirements of their AMI deployments, avoiding the risk of vendor lock-in, because it can lessen operational flexibility and increase costs. UnitySuite (trilliant.com/unitysuite-head-end-system), Trilliant’s device-independent head-end system (HES) software platform, integrates with more than 340 electric meter brands and models worldwide, in addition to supporting water, gas and thermal meters.

The addition of grid edge intelligence into Trilliant products should help utilities meet business needs and allow for the adoption of emerging applications and flexibility.

For more information about Trilliant’s smart grid technology, visit trilliant.com/smart-grid.

The partnership between Trilliant and Massachusetts-based Sense (sense.com) is effective immediately.