Silver Spring Networks has entered into an agreement with Indianapolis Power & Light Company to build IPL’s smart grid platform for deployment in the Indianapolis Metropolitan Region.

The deployment, to begin later this year, is part of IPL’s Smart Energy Project to promote energy efficiency, improve reliability, and deploy advanced metering. IPL is funding the project, in part, through a $20 million Smart Grid Investment Grant awarded by the Department of Energy (DOE) through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

Silver Spring’s unified infrastructure delivers the ability to run multiple applications over a secure IP-based network. Silver Spring will support IPL through a large-scale distribution automation system enabling much faster outage detection and notification, improving fault location and isolation and increasing energy efficiency. Silver Spring will also deploy Advanced Metering for IPL’s large commercial and industrial customers and a portion of its residential customers.