Itron Expands Contract with Entergy for Grid Management

LIBERTY LAKE, Wash. — Nov. 5, 2018 — Itron, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITRI), which is innovating the way utilities and cities manage energy and water, signed a new contract with Entergy, which serves approximately 2.9 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. As a part of the contract, Itron will expand Entergy’s network beyond what is planned in support of their advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to support 33,000 distribution automation (DA) endpoints.

Entergy's network expansion for DA will build on its existing Itron Gen5 network, which the utility is deploying to enable two-way meter communications and near-real time telemetry to support AMI applications. Itron’s high bandwidth and low latency network is designed to support multiple applications, including AMI, DA and other smart utility and smart city applications on a single network platform. With the addition of DA, utilities are equipped to re-route power around problems to minimize impact on customers, improve system reliability, improve power quality and provide pro-active customer service.

DA plays an important role in helping utilities improve grid reliability, use energy more efficiently and lower operating costs. By extending monitoring and control capabilities to a broad range of distribution devices with Itron’s DA solution, utilities gain greater visibility into the health and performance of their grid, allowing them to improve safety, extend asset life and improve service reliability. Itron’s DA networking solution also improves outage management and restoration by taking advantage of a low latency network to help detect and isolate outages, while working to automatically restore the network. In addition, it enables accurate routing of field crews to fault locations, potentially reducing restoration time.

“Using the Itron network to support distribution automation demonstrates the value of its multi-application capabilities both today and in the future. Our network is purpose-built to exceed distribution automation requirements, including high bandwidth and low latency, and enables utilities to improve grid reliability and lower operating costs,” said Sharelynn Moore, senior vice president of networked solutions at Itron.