Itron Unveils Grid Edge Essentials Solution to Enable Unprecedented Distribution Grid Visibility

LIBERTY LAKE, Wash. — Oct. 7, 2024 — Itron, Inc. (NASDAQ: ITRI), which is innovating new ways for utilities and cities to manage energy and water, today unveiled its Grid Edge Essentials solution, an industry-leading, pre-integrated, real-time solution to address the foundational issues utilities face at the grid edge and accelerate the energy transition. With Grid Edge Essentials, Itron simplifies and streamlines the adoption of new technologies, dramatically accelerating time to value by providing distribution grid visibility all the way to the grid edge and enhancing consumer engagement.

Electric utilities today are faced with challenges ranging from aging infrastructure and extreme weather events to load growth demand from transportation electrification and data centers and increased grid complexity from distributed energy resources (DERs). Grid Edge Essentials addresses the needs of advanced grid operations and customer service teams with a distributed intelligence (DI) solution that is easy to deploy, integrate and operate. It is the first end-to-end solution in the market that provides high-resolution data from the edge of a utility’s distribution network at every endpoint. This foundational solution can enhance grid capacity by as much as 20% through the optimization of existing grid assets.

Solution Benefits

Itron’s Grid Edge Essentials solution provides a broad set of benefits, including:

• Renewables Integration – real-time, autonomous visibility and local, standardized control (e.g., IEEE 2030.5) of distributed energy resources and their impact on the LV grid infrastructure.

• Resiliency & Reliability – highly accurate, measured location awareness via meter-to-phase, transformer and feeder mapping.

• Consumer Access & Engagement – more accurate load disaggregation together with more actionable, near real-time insights.

• Carbon Reduction – greater renewable integration while deferring expensive grid upgrades, reducing need for expensive peak power, and maintaining optimized voltage levels (CVR).

• Reduced Operating Costs – predictable low voltage operation with accurate insights into metering and network operations streamline operations and enhance preventive maintenance.

• Data Access – via DataHub, which provides secure, consistent API access to curated data products and lifecycle data management, enabling utilities to leverage more real-time, high-fidelity data across the utility enterprise. DataHub also enables utilities and their customers to share data with authorized third parties.

• Open Ecosystem – Enablement of third-party application development leveraging the DI developer program or curated APIs via the DataHub product accelerates innovation with a vibrant ecosystem.

“Building on our Grid Edge Intelligence portfolio launch earlier this year, Grid Edge Essentials streamlines the path to grid transformation for utilities, providing all of the necessary components to realize operational value now and forms the foundation for future services and use cases,” said Don Reeves, senior vice president of Outcomes. “Grid Edge Essentials is the first step in a utility’s journey to building an advanced, flexible and resilient grid that meets the needs of utility distribution grid operations and provides the utility’s customers with reliable energy.”

Solution Components

Grid Edge Essentials is a bundled, comprehensive solution that pre-integrates multiple products, including DI Quick Start, Operations Optimizer (OO) Essentials, Consumer Engagement, Grid Edge Optimizer solution delivering DI applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Hosting, Delivery Services, and Intelligent Grid Edge Operation System. The solution leverages Itron’s DI technology, advanced metering, Intelligent Connectivity and is built on Itron’s real-time, high-fidelity Intelligent Edge Operating System.

Itron’s Intelligent Edge Operating System

Itron’s newly launched Intelligent Edge Operating System serves as the foundation for Itron’s Grid Edge Intelligence portfolio. It is designed to provide real-time, large-scale, high-performance and secure data management for electricity, gas and water devices. The operating system aims to reduce implementation and operational costs by simplifying customer integrations through standard interfaces and by processing device data through a highly scalable common data processing layer.

Utilities’ systems seamlessly integrate with the Itron Intelligent Edge Operating System, and business applications utilize the operating system's common data model and modular components to enable their use cases leveraging previous investments. Additionally, utility or third-party applications can access all data through the common API patterns in Itron’s DataHub. This significantly accelerates utilities’ ability to operationalize data and provides a reliable source of data for next generation machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The adaptable platform is pre-integrated with Itron’s UtilityIQ, SensorIQ, OpenWay Collection Manager and Temetra headend software systems. Its modular and open architecture also allows it to be “headend agnostic” through standards such as CIM (Common Information Model), ensuring compatibility with a wide range of systems.

Availability

Grid Edge Essentials’ initial configuration for IOUs will be available in North America in December 2024. Configurations for international markets, cooperative and large municipal utilities will be available later in 2025 building on our AMI Essentials for Public Power solution. To learn more, visit the Grid Edge Essentials product page and read the brochure.