| | July 20208Modern Infrastructure to Move ForwardThe inevitable and steady rise in energy consumption has forced utility companies to fulfill rising consumer expectations and have made them accept the need for technological innovation for energy demand. The utility industry has been focusing on satisfying customer demands forwater, gas, and electricity in various traditional and proven ways for years. However, these energy distribution practices are now being challenged by a rapidly evolving technology landscape, privatization, and strict regulatory initiatives globally. The term smart utilities imply effective utilization of technology to control and monitor energy flow across an ecosystem. This includes producers, distributors, and consumers, all of who gained exponential jump due to an increased emphasis on sustainable energy solutions. Utility companies are using various smart technologies to ensure sustainable energy supply by minimizing losses, assuring high levels of quality, safety, and reliability across an ecosystem and meet customers' demand for more flexibility, choice, and a better experience. Aclara, a provider of smart infrastructure solutions (SIS), offers solutions to more than 800 water, gas, and electric utilities around the world. Aclara's SIS integrates software, hardware, and data technologies that provide actionable insights to make distribution systems more efficient, responsive, flexible, and reliable.Smart infrastructure solutions - Mitigate risksGas utilities are currently dealing with aging and stressed distribution infrastructures, potential leaks, and increased regulatory scrutiny. To mitigate these challenges and help gas utilities predict and respond to risks across their distribution networks, and tackle increasing regulatory pressures, Aclara offers advanced metering infrastructure, monitoring, and analytics solutions. Aclara's SIS assists gas utilities in managing their distribution networks with customer care and billing, methane detection, and pressure monitoring. By eliminatingestimated reads and providing customers with consistent billing, customer care and billing solutions smoothens revenue collection and reduces calls to customer service representatives.Methane detection eliminates the risk of explosions and harmful emissions by detecting leakage while pressure monitoring helps in responding before the occurrence of any incidents with real-time insights into pipeline integrity.According to the Environmental Protection Agency, a trillion gallons of water is wasted every year due to old pipes and infrastructure in U.S. and water utilities are struggling to solve this problem. Aclara offers a solution to this issue with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) technologies that mitigate the impact of meter inaccuracy and leakage, unbilled unmetered consumption, and reclaim lost water revenue. With its data-driven approach, the company assists utilities by providing insights into resources with data analytics and enables utilities to improve systems, services, manage water distribution networks, and recover revenues. Aclara's SIS helps utilities overcome challenges with pressure monitoring utilizing real-time data and prevent sewer overflows using sensing technology.Since electric power grid is transforming, electric utilities are looking for solutions to increase visibility into their distribution networks. The increased demand and integration of distributed resources on their aging system forced utilities to hunt for the solutions to better manage their assets and fluctuations in voltage, current, and loads. Aclara's SIS enables electric utilities to take advantage of smart meters, edge devices, and data to mitigate these challenges. Aclara's solutions allow distributed generation of electricity by integrating electricity generated from windmills, solar arrays, independent power facilities, and microgrids. Aclara also offers solutions to control the load fluctuation due to distributed generation, increased demand, IN MY OPINIONAllan Connolly, Group President, Hubbell Power Systems IncBy
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