Oracle Corporation, the software giant based in Redwood Shores, California, is the world's leading supplier of information management software. Its products operate in everything from personal digital assistants to global information networks. For Oracle's thousands of software developers, as well as customers that depend on non-stop 24-hour-a-day technical support, power interruptions can be extremely costly. "It can mean as much as 5 to 10 million dollars per day for us in lost sales and productivity," states Jeff Byron, Oracle's Corporate Utility Manager. "It also affects our customers who have mission-critical support needs."

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Today's utilities have a critical need for real-time energy information, especially in a true market economy where both energy suppliers and consumers can influence the amount and price of power. RETX focused on price response and emergency response, where end users can adjust usage based on the price of electricity, release power back to the grid by shedding loads or starting up generators, and respond to utility requests for load curtailment due to power supply shortfalls or transmission constraints. Suppliers don't have to invest in new generation, and can satisfy their customers during peak demand and avoid expensive capacity contracts. Reducing demand by 5% can drop market prices by 50%, but all participants need access to the same information and the ability to react immediately. Intelligent PowerLogic ION devices installed at participating end-user sites provide the necessary metering and communications to allow this. Participants needn't buy software, and there aren't any expensive integration points between customer and utility, or the utility and ISO. The system creates a marketplace where end users can sell their capacity, profitably, on the basis of price or reliability.

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For NASA and its Kennedy Space Center(KSC) the value of having a robust system to monitor its power events and consumption wasn?t enough. The greater value came in implementing a system that could be integrated into a basewide supervisory control and data acquisition system (SCADA), allowing for more advanced monitoring and opening the door for uses that go well beyond simply power.

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Salt River Project (SRP) is a nearly $2.0 billion water and electric utility serving over 800,000 customers in Phoenix, Arizona. As competition in its area increases, SRP is always on the lookout for ways to offer customers better service and better power quality (PQ). While the company has had a power quality program in place for years, it is continually striving to excel in this arena. Recently, SRP decided to expand upon the common utility practice of documenting outage frequency and duration to also include a system to measure voltage sags. Utilities generally focus their efforts heavily on system reliability, but pay less attention to power quality issues like voltage sags because these events don't cause widespread outages and only affect customers who are sensitive to voltage fluctuations.

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The Salt River Project (SRP) Hassayampa Switchyard is a 500kV transmission facility with 10 bays, handling power flowing to and from four different independent power producers and several other substations. SRP needed combined instrument/transformer loss compensation and power factor monitoring, plus aggregation and scaling of real-time data. A PowerLogic ION® system from Square D®/Schneider Electric delivered this functionality at an affordable price. Transformer and instrument losses are measured from the secondary side, saving installation costs without sacrificing accuracy. Substation bays operate as four loops, with PowerLogic ION8000 series meters configured as Modbus Master devices, each gathering real-time data from its loop to perform scaling and aggregation before passing values to a central RTU. The network fully integrates with the MV-90 billing system and provides a valuable backup function - if the RTU or communication links fail, the data can be retrieved manually from any meter. When generators go online and merchant sites produce their own power, the breakers close and the meters go offline. Information is shared among authorized users, and advanced security features ensure that confidential data is going only to the right place, and nowhere else.

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Limited access to natural resources, such as water and oil, challenge the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to provide its five million residents with a secure source of reliable and affordable energy. The country is building a national energy-information infrastructure to monitor energy transactions and billing between the newly independent power generation, transmission, and distribution companies. Each separate company must accurately monitor and communicate to all market participants everything from the quantity and quality of power produced and delivered, to up-to-the-minute billing and time-of-use data. An energy and power monitoring system from Power Measurement (now part of Schneider Electric) using a network of 150 intelligent, GPS time-synchronized meters linked to four software servers, tracks and verifies all energy transactions. A parallel metering network confirms consistency and accuracy of all data and parallel servers, equipped with identical energy management and billing software, sit at each company's headquarters to receive information from all metering points. This reliable, synchronized, countrywide enterprise energy management system has set the stage for a competitive, financially viable environment for the production and sale of electricity.

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Oncor, the regulated energy delivery business within Dallas-based TXU Corporation, is the first company in the United States to rely on high speed Ethernet to transmit energy production data from merchant power plants to the Independent System Operator (ISO). The information is used for transaction settlement and billing, and Ethernet provides a more cost effective, reliable, and secure solution than intermittent modem links.

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Rio Grande Electric Cooperative (RGEC) in Brackettville, Texas, provides electric service to over 10,000 metering points across Texas and New Mexico. Traditionally, the company's commitment to providing a reliable source of power across 27,000-square-miles of barren terrain has presented some interesting challenges; just to check and service remote substations, maintenance crews routinely faced driving times of up to seven hours each way. So when RGEC's Technical Services department considered upgrades to the co-op's electrical metering equipment, the question of communications was paramount. Here was an opportunity to monitor the status of the entire distribution network, while reducing the amount of time technicians must spend on the road - but how could they communicate with remote substations where telephone coverage was sparse, and cellular networks practically nonexistent? As part of a planned upgrade to a full PowerLogic® ION® system from Square D®/Schneider Electric, RGEC identified satellite communications as the answer. Combining reasonable costs with unlimited flexibility, satellite stood out as the most cost-effective way to support reliable communications between the energy-management software installed at the headquarters, and the network of intelligent energy meters destined for the remote substations.

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Vector is one of New Zealand's largest network infrastructure companies with a portfolio of businesses and services delivering electricity, gas, and high-speed broadband voice and data communications throughout New Zealand. One of Vector?s core businesses is the delivery of high quality and reliable power to customers. To support their customer satisfaction goals, Vector recently upgraded its bulk metering system. The upgrade provided Vector with an opportunity to take the first steps toward an "intelligent substation" solution. The vision included direct data transmission over the Internet as well as high-speed Ethernet, automatically generated reports for data sharing within the company and with customers, and advanced power quality analysis.

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Serious reductions in energy costs require gathering, analyzing data.

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