Today, at the American Public Power Association’s National Conference & Public Power Expo, Silver Spring Networks, Inc. extended its Speed-to-Value smart infrastructure program to municipal utilities. Silver Spring also announced that it is delivering its award-winning smart street light solution to help smaller municipalities leverage advanced smart city technology to lower operations and management costs, reduce energy usage, and improve the reliability of their public lighting infrastructure.

“Rather than settling for aging technology that is nearing obsolescence, municipal energy providers can now access world-class smart grid and smart city solutions, and roll them out at whatever speed they wish because of breakthroughs in networking technology and our Network-as-a-Service offering,” said Don Reeves, Executive Vice President of Products, Engineering, and Managed Services at Silver Spring Networks. “Our multi-application, proven, scalable, and secure networking platform already connects over 18.5 million devices for utilities and cities around the world. We’re dedicated to continuing to bring some of the industry’s most advanced technologies to the millions of citizens that are served by the nation’s public power providers.”

Modularly Scale Your Smart Grid With Silver Spring’s Speed-to-Value Program

Enabled by its innovative MicroAP technology, which integrates cellular capability, Silver Spring can modularly deploy an IPv6 smart grid network canopy covering a municipal or cooperative utility’s entire service territory. These providers can then scale out their programs in a flexible fashion that meets the unique needs of their particular municipality, and easily connect new customers as their smart grid programs expand. From as little as a single commercial and industrial (C&I) customer to an apartment complex or city block, this canopy allows energy providers to add new participants to the smart grid network, regardless of customer type or geographic location within the service territory.

Silver Spring’s expanded Speed-to-Value program enables municipal and cooperative utilities to simply add additional MicroAP’s to their existing smart grid network canopies as they modularly expand their programs. This allows energy providers to deploy their smart grids at the pace and scale that makes the most sense for their unique environments, easily and quickly add new customers and services, and create “opt in” programs. This approach enables efficiencies in system design, logistics and deployment that reduce project timelines by an estimated 15% to 30%, while allowing utilities with constrained budgets to focus their efforts on delivering the highest ROI applications at the pace their business needs demand.

The same smart grid network canopy also supports advanced Grid Reliability and Distribution Automation applications for improved outage restoration. The real-time nature of the network helps provide consumers with their personalized energy data in a much more engaging and timely basis, enabling the possibility of advanced time-of-use or other incentive based pricing offers.

Smart Street Light Networks for Smaller Cities

As much as 40 percent of a municipality’s energy spending is on street lights. Smart public lighting networks can drive reductions of more than 25 percent in street light energy consumption and can lower overall system costs by up to 35 percent. When combined with new LED technology, Silver Spring’s smart street light solution can deliver up to 65 percent in energy savings over traditional high-pressure sodium street lights and can reduce maintenance costs by up to 90 percent.

Silver Spring’s smart street light solution enables lighting operators to more efficiently and reliably operate their lighting networks by controlling street light voltage, automating dimming and illumination, remotely monitoring street light performance and outages, and extending the lifespan of street lights deployed in the field. Cities can also leverage this IPv6 smart street light network to connect other critical infrastructure, including traffic lights, parking meters, environmental sensors, and electric vehicle chargers, among others.

Silver Spring can deliver its smart street light solution via a Network-as-a-Service offering, where it will deploy, manage, and operate smart street light networks on behalf of cities with at least 3,000 street lights. This allows municipalities to avoid upfront capital equipment and deployment costs, reduce operational and management expenditures, and lower the risk of unwieldy and complex projects. It also enables cities to leverage the same street light network for the deployment of additional smart city applications over time, lowering long-term costs and accelerating speed of deployment for these new services.

Accelerating Smart Grid Benefits for Municipal and Cooperative Providers

Silver Spring also delivers a ready-to-deploy Municipal and Cooperative Smart Grid Solution that speeds evaluation, reduces risk, lowers costs, and empowers municipal and cooperative utilities’ consumers. With a focus on making it easy to rapidly scope, deploy and test results, the solution delivers a range of capabilities such as sophisticated Advanced Metering Infrastructure for electricity, water, and natural gas customers, Demand Response, Distribution Automation, and other critical infrastructure applications over time. Silver Spring is working with municipal and cooperative utilities such as CPS Energy, Modesto Irrigation District, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Snohomish County Public Utility District, and others to unlock smart grid benefits for their consumers today.