Sense CEO Mike Phillips discusses ongoing utility infrastructure spending and expresses concern that utilities are still purchasing legacy metering technology.
Insight
Phillips: High-frequency data access matters more than edge processing power
“I've been a little less concerned about that, because for computation, you can always be very efficient about your algorithms, and you can make trade-offs from the algorithms. The reason we're more concerned about the data is if you don't have the data, you do…”
Assertion Supported
Phillips: High-resolution edge computing enables real-time grid visibility
“Technical capabilities, so high resolution data, edge computing, real-time networking that we use to interact with consumers on what's happening in their home, we can look the other direction and we can see what the grid is doing in real time from the edge.”
Insight
Phillips: Treat smart meters as distributed computing platforms, not collection devices
“Once you start to think of this as a distributed platform, not just a data collection device, this entire world of making use of the data at the edge and AI machine learning at the edge starts to get opened up.”
Insight
Phillips: Legacy smart meter architecture cannot support real-time grid visibility
“Low-resolution data sent up to the service provider, made available later on, and look, there's some things you can do with that, but you just can't have a real-time, consumer-facing app, and then you can't see the grid in real-time from the edge either.”
Insight
Phillips: High-resolution meter data enables real-time grid fault detection
“What we've learned since then is that same high-resolution data lets us see, ah, the grid from the edge, lets us see transformers arcing, lets us see vegetation hanging power lines in real-time. That only happens through high-resolution data.”
Insight
Phillips: Next-gen smart meters require three core technical capabilities
“There are just these three main topics that I've been talking about, which is getting access to the right data, so high-resolution waveform data. It's well known how to do that. It's mature technology, we know how to do that. Having enough computation so that …”