Ambient Corp fka AMBTQ

[road_trip_kid]

Duke Energy and six companies have joined together to build a distributed-intelligence application to eliminate silos and improve grid performance while allowing grid assets to be inter-operable. The “Coalition of the Willing” (COW) group – Accenture, Alstom Grid, Ambient Corporation, Duke Energy, Echelon, S&C, and Verizon - will prove that disparate assets, data, and control commands can be shared across multiple platforms to achieve interoperability with lower costs and faster response times. The first phase of this project will be to convert a Volt/Var Optimization (VVO) function to run on a distributed platform. This is accomplished by utilizing a “communications node” and a standards-based messaging architecture to enable peer-to-peer communications and to federate data from previously siloed systems. The COW participants are exposing some data locally via a standards-based interface. The VVO phase of this project will be tested in Duke Energy’s McAlpine Smart Grid test area in Charlotte. The distributed VVO application will reside on field communication nodes, run on a variety of field message buses, and be tested on both the 3G and 4G LTE Verizon Wireless networks. The application will average two residential meter voltages being supplied by Echelon meters and bring them back via Power Line Carrier (PLC) to the Ambient communication node. The application will determine if an under voltage condition exists, if one does, the application will send a close command to the control via DNP3 through peer to peer messaging over the Verizon Wireless network. The capacitor control will receive the close command and close the capacitor bank to try and alleviate the under voltage condition on the meters. The final step in this process will be to update the Alstom DMS as to the new state of the capacitor. If an under voltage still exists, the application will send a flag to the DMS so it can perform further corrective action. http://s36.a2zinc.net/clients/pennwell/dtech2014/Public/SessionDetails.aspx?SessionID=7055