Itron announced it has signed a contract with Vectren Energy Delivery of Indiana – South, a subsidiary of Vectren Corporation, to modernize its energy grid.
Vectren provides energy delivery services to 250,000 electricity and gas customers in southwestern Indiana and will install Itron’s OpenWay Riva IoT solution throughout its South territory to support customer experience transformation efforts.
Vectren will also take advantage of Itron Total Outcomes, which provides cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications for the operation of the system and analytics-based business outcomes.
The project builds on Vectren’s successful roll-out of automated meter reading for 600,000 gas customers in Indiana (North) and 300,000 customers in Ohio, the company said.
Itron’s OpenWay Riva solution will give Vectren a multi-application network infrastructure and technology platform that features distributed computing power at every level of the network, including in every electric meter.
The new platform enables real-time analysis of data and secured peer-to-peer communication among meters and intelligent devices within the network to manage rapidly changing grid conditions.
The solution also features adaptive communications technology to deliver high-performance communications with reliable connectivity in all types of service environments.
With these capabilities, Vectren can deliver new services and value to its customers. The utility will virtually eliminate estimated meter reads and give customers detailed insights into daily electricity and gas usage, helping them better manage their energy consumption and costs.
In addition to smart metering capabilities, Vectren’s OpenWay Riva solution will include a new distributed outage management application to improve outage detection and analysis.
“By choosing OpenWay Riva and Itron Total Outcomes, Vectren is deploying a highly capable smart metering solution that will deliver immediate operational and customer service benefits,” said Mark de Vere White, president of Itron’s Electricity business line.
“More importantly, from a strategic standpoint, Vectren recognizes the vital role that edge intelligence, peer-to-peer communications and distributed computing capability at every customer premise will play in building a next-generation energy services company,” White added.