IBM and CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric have unveiled plans to create a coalition of energy firms that would use Web 2.0 tools to share information about major projects.
IBM says it hopes the Intelligent Utility Network (IUN) Coalition effort will help boost the adoption of grid computing within the energy sector.
IBM is working with CenterPoint on a US$750 million (NZ$1.01 billion), five-year project to automate its entire operation. The effort includes construction of an IUN, an information architecture that allows for the automated real-time monitoring of assets like meters, power lines and customer usage to improve service and reliability, CenterPoint officials say.
The CenterPoint IUN includes a grid that will provide data, information and analytics to help workers improve outage detection and restoration times along with ongoing operations. CenterPoint is using IBM’s integration middleware, information management software and enterprise portal to create the IUN.
“The products that consume electricity today are increasingly digital, but the delivery system for electricity is still mostly analogue,” says Georgianna Nichols, group president of CenterPoint Houston Electric Operations. “We’re deploying an intelligent grid infrastructure to digitise the electric grid.”
“A year ago we were very optimistic ...about automated meter reading,” Nichols says. “Within 12 months this has grown so much bigger that it is a discussion around almost revolutionising the whole electric utility industry. We were dreaming about it a year ago. Today it is a reality and we are testing equipment.”
IBM plans to provide companies that join the coalition with access to its portal and to other collaboration tools such as wikis and blogs to help them to work together at various levels from executive management down to IT developers, says Brad Gammons, vice president of IBM’s global energy and utilities industry.
“Think of social networking at a solution development level,” he says. “What is different here is allowing a group of utilities to collaborate in really making real things that have been tested. This is about moving to operational deployment.”
IBM says it expects to add at least one or two more members to the coalition in the next three months and to have seven on board by the end of the year.