SparkMeter, a provider of grid management services and solutions that increase access to reliable electricity in underserved communities across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, will support two grant-funded projects under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity's $7.5 million investment to address system challenges, improve overall grid performance, and advance grid reliability and resilience.
The company was selected to support two of the eight projects awarded grants as part of the Inflation Reduction Act:
- Iowa State University (ISU), which received $1,000,000 to enhance utilities' awareness of real-time health conditions of distribution transformers, minimizing service disruptions and improving system reliability and resilience; and
- West Kentucky Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation (WKRECC), which is a subrecipient to a $999,933 grant received by the University of Kentucky to improve transformer capacity utilization, reduce overloading, and enhance load modeling and event detection to minimize grid outage times.
Both projects will use SparkMeter's AI-driven Praxis data engineering platform, which provides a 360-degree view of utility data sources to access and process large-scale datasets from any source. Using Praxis's comprehensive suite of data analytics tools, researchers and utilities can obtain an accurate and insightful understanding of transformer loading conditions in real time.
In collaboration with Iowa State University and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), SparkMeter will offer its GridScan software to simplify the visualization and analysis of thousands of distribution transformers using data from three utilities: a rural co-op, Linn County REC; an investor-owned utility, AES; and a municipal utility, Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU).
SparkMeter will also serve as a key contributor to a three-year project led by the University of Kentucky, WKRECC, Milsoft, and Sensus, to improve transformer capacity utilization, reduce transformer overloading, and increase transformer lifetime.
