Texas-based Grid4C’s Grid Edge AI app has become part of Itron’s expanding ecosystem of distributed intelligence (DI) applications.

Grid4C has installed the app in Itron’s Raleigh DI Lab and it will be available via its enterprise application centre later this year.

The app can deliver predictive insights to utilities to balance supply and demand, offer products and services, optimise distributed energy resources (DERs) and increase customer engagement. Washington-based Itron’s DI platform enables use cases based on aggregated computing and distributed decision-making at the grid edge with high data fidelity.

The Grid4C DI app helps utilities plan and enable energy efficiency and sustainability goals while engaging with consumers in reducing peak loads. It uses AI-powered algorithms on Itron’s secure, open-standards platform to determine appliance fault and inefficiencies predictions, detection and diagnostics; appliance load disaggregation; anomaly detection; meter load forecasting; and other insights.

The intelligence provided through the app can be used by any customer engagement channel to help provide timely energy insights and notifications. This intelligence can also be consumed by utility applications to help optimise grid resources.

Grid4C used Itron’s software development kit for distributed intelligence to integrate its app into the Itron enterprise application centre.

“By embedding the most advanced machine learning insights directly into Itron’s robust, high-performance IIoT network, we help utilities plan and optimise distributed energy resources in real time at the edge of the grid, preventing faults both on the grid side and on the consumer side and helping consumers better manage their energy,” said Noa Ruschin Rimini, CEO of Grid4C. “By joining Itron’s DI partner ecosystem, we will bring added value to Itron’s customers and the communities they serve.”

Itron’s distributed intelligence platform allows innovators to build open, interoperable, value-driven apps on Itron’s secure platform that evolve with market and consumer demands. The DI development programme enables an ecosystem of third-party developers to ensure a greater selection of applications to meet utility needs today and into the future.

These applications are available via the enterprise application centre, which features a portfolio of Itron and third-party applications that connect to Itron’s IoT network. The centre is the operational backbone for Itron’s utility customers to manage applications for customers via a private, secure web portal. 

“Our collaboration with Grid4C is a great example of the power of a secure, open ecosystem and how we are expanding our utility customers’ choice when it comes to engaging with their customers,” said Don Reeves, senior vice president at Itron. “Our DI vision is enabled through an open and vibrant ecosystem of providers, which creates more opportunity for the consumer to capture the value of shifts in technology. With very accurate high-fidelity data, developers can create applications that weren’t possible before. We are excited about how Grid4C is taking advantage the capabilities of our DI platform and the opportunity to make their solution available to our customers through our Itron enterprise application centre. This application will enable consumers and utilities to take advantage of energy insights and optimise grid operations.”

Grid4C empowers energy providers and consumers by enabling the power to foresee, leveraging machine-learning capabilities to deliver accurate, granular predictions, which are crucial for tackling the rising challenges of the energy industry. Its plug-and-play offerings analyse the massive amounts of sub-hourly data collected from millions of smart meters and IoT data.

Its portfolio consists of a predictive home advisor, which includes non-intrusive household appliance fault prediction and load disaggregation capabilities, predictive operational analytics enabling better decisions for coordination of distributed energy resources with meter, sub-meter and asset-level forecasting, and predictive customer analytics, which targets and predicts adoption of new rate plans and utility programmes.