NRTC lands two new smart grid product offerings

The National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, a service organization with rural telco and utility members, this week added two new offerings to the portfolio of smart grid solutions it offers to its members. The new offerings include wireless communications equipment from Sensus that uses licensed frequencies and a next-generation SCADA offering from Efacec, said NRTC Vice President of Marketing Phil Brenner in an interview with Connected Planet.

Equipment manufacturers such as these like to work with NRTC as a means of breaking into the rural utility market, which consists of about 900 small companies scattered around the country, Brenner said. Meanwhile, NRTC members get better pricing than they would be able to obtain on their own, along with some assurance that products are “rural-ready,” Brenner said.

He noted, for example, that the average rural utility in NRTC has seven customers per mile of line—and some products are only economical for serving urban and metro areas that have dozens of customers per line mile. NRTC, he said, has engineering and business development staff whose job is to verify the functionality of potential new products, along with the business case for the product, before making a product available to NRTC members.

Seeking synergies
The NRTC sought out the communications equipment from Sensus in response to requests from some members for an alternative to the powerline communications equipment that the organization already handles. Sensus holds the license on the spectrum that its equipment uses, enabling its equipment to operate at the high power levels required for rural applications, Brenner said. Because unlicensed solutions have stricter power restrictions, they typically cannot support transmission over distances of “tens of miles” as required by rural utility companies, he explained.

Some small rural telcos have been hoping to generate new revenue streams by supplying at least some of the communications capability that their utility company counterparts will need to support smart grid initiatives. And because NRTC has both telco and utility company members, it would appear to be well positioned to facilitate deals between member organizations.

“We’re seeing a lot of dialog between electric companies and telcos,” said Brenner. And while utility members are still in the early stages of planning their smart grid deployments, Brenner said he has already seen telcos and utilities that have partnered to use common trenches and conduit. In addition, he said, he is aware of one rural utility and telco that have opted to merge their operations, perhaps as a result of the drive toward the smart grid.