San Francisco, United States – Aetheros, with its IoT operating system for machine type computing and communications, has entered the U.S. market to boost the next wave of smart metre deployments with distributed intelligence. Aether Operating System (AOS) provides an oneM2M-compliant IoT service layer for distributed intelligence.
As demand for renewable energy, battery storage, and electric vehicles grows, AOS enables an open ecosystem for secure edge applications and smart metres that addresses the changing needs of electricity throughout the U.S..
The replacement of the initial deployments of over 100 million smart metres in the U.S. is underway and utility requirements have changed, prompting the need to re-imagine these endpoints to accelerate the energy transition. To meet these new smart metre requirements, many U.S. utilities seek to add analytics and control at the edge of their distribution network to enable the open integration and support of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles, while improving their operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction. Doing so will require an IoT service layer, and Aetheros provides the only open, proven, and scalable solution.
“Our smart metre networking software, field proven with over fifteen years of deployment in Australia and New Zealand, has accelerated innovation by enabling distributed edge intelligence in the most advanced utility markets in the world,” says Ray Bell, founder of Aetheros, former CEO and co-founder of Silver Spring Networks and CEO and founder of Grid Net. “For years, we’ve enabled our customers to deploy analytics and control at the edge of their distribution network to detect conditions such as floating neutral, high and low voltage, and frequency imbalances, and to implement advanced services like virtual power plants and dynamic volt/var control. AOS allows utilities to improve safety and distribution efficiencies, lower operating costs, raise customer satisfaction, and deliver new smart energy services. With the second wave of replacement smart metre deployments underway, now is the time to bring our AOS product portfolio to utilities in North America.”
Bell and his team of Silicon Valley veterans created the initial wave of IP networking and smart metre technologies in the U.S., and are now using their knowledge and proven track record in Australia and New Zealand to guide U.S. utilities during the next wave of smart metre deployments. “The first deployments of smart metres in the U.S. were all about time of use billing and using demand response programs to offset the need to build more generation capacity. Today’s requirements are much more complex,” Bell continues. “Utilities need to use distributed edge analytics and control to build a more efficient and diverse smart energy ecosystem. These needs cannot be met with single vendor walled garden approaches. There’s an urgent need in the utility industry for an open standards-based IoT Service Layer that allows market innovation to flow freely.”
AOS provides the scale proven open IoT service layer that does not lock in customers. Users can build, deploy, and manage IoT networks and edge applications and services using the hardware and software of their choice. As AOS grows across North America, utilities and their suppliers alike will have the freedom to unlock a wide, new range of smart energy service opportunities, including:
- Enable a transactive, distributed energy market: Energy providers can build applications that facilitate the buying and selling of energy resources. Consumers with solar panels and batteries, for instance, can sell excess energy in the open energy market and provide grid services.
- Balance power based on distributed resources: With AOS, authenticated edge applications can instantly access cumulative and instantaneous smart metering data, enabling local demand response and load management decisions. For example, utilities can utilise analytics and control within their smart metres to locally monitor and manage the customer’s solar inverters, batteries, and smart appliances to create virtual power plants (VPPs) that curtail energy demand or help balance the distribution grid.
- Advance EV charging infrastructure: EV charging station operators can optimise their buy/sell transactions based on market and local distribution network supply conditions, as well as participate in demand response and VPP programs. EV drivers can remotely communicate via their mobile phone with charging stations along their route and reserve a charge point in advance which only works with their vehicle at the allotted start time window.
- Accelerate Industrial IoT: Edge devices collect data from industrial equipment to filter, prioritise, and process OT data. With AOS, industrial operations can build new IIoT distributed intelligence applications to communicate with factory infrastructure in near real-time.
oneM2M is a global partnership project founded in 2012 and constituted by eight of the ICT standards development organisations. The oneM2M IoT standards are the result of collaboration among 200+ global leaders across industries, including utilities, telecommunications, transportation, and agriculture. oneM2M specifications are freely available, as are a wealth of application developer guides, training materials, developer tools, working groups, and forums.
“Having an open operating system that supports distributed intelligence at the edge is essential to the future of the energy sector,” says Adrian Clark, CEO of CrescoNet and founder and former CEO of Intellihub, an utility services company in Australia and New Zealand. “Smart metres with intelligent edge computing enables us to provide our customers with the dynamic control and demand response services that they need. With AOS, we have been able to leverage real-time energy analytics and control at the edge of the distribution network to deliver new competitive energy products and services, and keep Australia and New Zealand on the map as the global leader in smart energy innovation.”
To learn more about Aetheros solutions and technical specifications, please visit Aetheros.
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