Sierra Wireless today announced its partnership with Duke Energy, and other technology companies, to form the Coalition of the Willing (COW-II) initiative to implement and test a microgrid solution in Mount Holly, North Carolina.
The COW-II is focused on establishing a power grid that is more simple and cost effective to operate by enabling advanced interoperability between disparate monitoring and control systems in the utility’s smart grid.
As a contributor of the COW-II project, Sierra Wireless provided its industry leading 4G LTE AirLink® gateways that have the capability to translate DNP3 protocol, widely used in electric utility’s equipment, into MQTT, a state-of-the-art Internet of Things (IoT) messaging protocol. This is achieved by using an embedded application—ALEOS Application Framework (AAF)—that is available on all AirLink® gateways, and provides intelligence at the edge.
Jason Krause, Sierra Wireless Senior Vice President, Enterprise Solutions, says:
“Conversion of DNP3 to MQTT protocol at the edge of the network enables our AirLink® gateways to read and write data directly from connected electric meters, and publish-subscribe information to a common message bus.”
“This feature allows disparate network components to communicate with one another, where they previously could not.”
“The results from COW-II demonstrate that enhanced microgrid operations can be achieved using an OpenFMB architecture to quickly combine data between grid-edge nodes, in a scalable and resilient fashion,” says Stuart Laval, Manager of Technology Development, Emerging Technology Office, Duke Energy. “This is encouraging for power utilities looking to improve efficiency and customer service, while managing their ageing infrastructure. The innovation that we’ve witnessed from this initiative would not be possible without the collaboration from our industry partners.”