Would you believe that nearly 90 percent of all power outages happen in the last mile of the power grid? Worse yet, with no visibility into the status of power availability or the quality of the distribution portion of the electrical power grid, utility companies often aren’t alerted to an outage until customers call, send a text or post about their experience on social media platforms.

Enter Gridmetrics, Inc.

Originally incubated at CableLabs, Gridmetrics leverages the cable industry’s access-network monitoring capabilities and expertise to measure, monitor and track the availability and stability of voltage in the last mile of the U.S. power distribution grid.

The idea behind Gridmetrics was inspired by Dr. Robert Cruickshank, a DOCSIS pioneer and currently a researcher in power grid modernization. He recognized that the energy sector needs to rethink the way electron flow is managed, which requires new insights and instrumentation—particularly at the grid edge, where generation from renewables is increasingly changing the dynamics of the power demand/response paradigm. More specifically, Gridmetrics evolved from a conversation in 2017 between Dr. Cruickshank, who at the time was a visiting researcher from National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL), and Scott Caruso, who leads strategic ventures at CableLabs.

Gridmetrics is rooted in the belief that the broadband industry is uniquely positioned to provide insights that enable utilities to shape the flow of electrons, much like the early days of DOCSIS and data traffic shaping algorithms. The central idea behind Gridmetrics is to combine existing power sensor data extracted from fiber-node power supplies—delivered on private, high-speed secure communications networks—with analytics and AI to create an out-of-band network of grid sensors. Gridmetrics is positioned to deliver critical new insights and instrumentation to utilities operating the last miles of the power grid.

The two vast, global networks—the power distribution grid and the broadband access network—literally share the last mile (or the first mile, depending on your perspective). In the United States, the broadband network is composed of hundreds of providers, but the last miles of the power grid are operated by thousands of distribution entities, private and public. As a result, in the United States, there is no uniform operation, or even a view of the distribution power grid. Gridmetrics’ premise is based on providing the most comprehensive, independent, observational view of the distribution power grid. Gridmetrics aggregates the inverter status and input voltage every five minutes from hundreds of thousands of existing fiber-node power supplies. These “sensors” have the added advantage of being power resilient with battery backup, thus providing an unprecedented view of the power distribution grid, even when the power grid itself is down.

Gridmetrics’ first application of this new data set centered on a collaborative R&D project with NREL called Situational Awareness of Grid Anomalies (SAGA). The goal of the multi-year, multi-million-dollar project is to create a visualization tool that trains computers to classify grid events in near real time, in the context of potential grid cybersecurity threats.

Anthony Florita, Principal Engineer at NREL and SAGA Principle Investigator, stated: “Gridmetrics supplies a unique data set that is becoming increasingly important as an out-of-band view of the power distribution grid. We have been working with Gridmetrics to utilize this data for grid cybersecurity applications such as SAGA. In addition, we continue to explore opportunities utilizing Gridmetrics as an aide in the modernization of our power distribution grid.”

The Power Event Notification System (PENS) is Gridmetrics’ first commercial product offering, and it essentially creates a state diagram of the distribution grid every five minutes. PENS identifies events (primarily power outages) by looking at state changes in the sensor network across time and space (proximity). PENS has many applications—including insurance, fintech, real estate, corporate security, business resilience and smart cities—but the most urgent and important use of PENS is its application in the public safety, emergency response and situational awareness markets. This is because PENS offers near real-time, hyper-local power insights, often during our fellow citizens’ time of greatest need. PENS empowers public safety and emergency response to shift from reactive to proactive by helping to direct resources to power-vulnerable populations and facilities. PENS is essentially creating a power outage solution.

Gridmetrics wouldn’t have been possible without the support of CableLabs and its membership. And we’re just getting started! Although PENS opens a whole new chapter for Gridmetrics, one of the key learnings over the past few years is the uniqueness of the platform that houses our sensors. In aggregate, Gridmetrics represents the greatest density and distribution available to host commercial-grade Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that require very low latency, secure backhaul and power resilience. Today, participation in Gridmetrics is a no/low-lift for broadband operators. It’s simply a piece of software that polls and aggregates data from the existing equipment in the access network. Then, imagine the possibilities of Gridmetrics hosting purpose-built sensors that could take full advantage of this unique platform. Stay tuned!