Transcript
Power Quality and the Modern Grid
Today, power is among the most basic business needs. When faced with energy-related challenges, businesses may suffer from damage to equipment or interruption of critical business activities. The ultimate result is a loss in productivity and decreased revenue.
The large thing that’s happening in the industry is up until the past five to 10 years, if the power went out at your house, the utility didn’t know it until you called them and told them the power was out. And so you hear things about smart grid and about the internet of things, and what’s happening is the utilities are slowly evolving into more modern entities that have test points that can give them feedback and information very quickly on a real-time basis.
A small investment in power quality, either in equipment or education, can prevent regulatory scrutiny, lawsuit claims, customer downtime, and early equipment failure.
Challenges Facing Energy Companies
Things are changing quickly for energy companies, especially as it relates to the power grid. For instance, trying to integrate variable generation sources such as wind and solar presents challenges because they’re not always there. So energy companies are looking at innovative technology investments to maximize the efficiency of the power grid so that customers will benefit.
About Power Monitors, Incorporated
Power Monitors, Incorporated develops, manufactures, and sells power quality equipment that helps utilities save money and provide the highest quality power to customers. We’ve got thousands of customers and over the years have sold tens of thousands of devices, and they are designed based on what the customers need. When we come up with a new product, we develop it for their needs.
Our devices are highly complex, weatherproof, ruggedized, and so to the average person they’re not affordable, but to the utility industry, compared to the other devices they buy and use, they’re very affordable. We keep our devices inexpensive by driving the cost out of them and making all of our designs shrink. As our devices have evolved, they’ve gone from being six inches by six inches by six inches and weatherproof to being able to fit in my shirt pocket.
Innovation and Technology
The company is on a mission to become the most trusted player in the power industry and is doing so by bringing the most innovative and emerging technologies to the industry. To bring the latest technology to our customers, we have to be continuously inventing and reinventing our products using the latest technology to help us design products. That includes the latest of test equipment, design tools, and design processes.
Some of the specific test equipment involves advanced LTE signaling equipment, high voltage pulse equipment, environmental chambers to generate the same environment that our products are used in. Our products have advanced Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell communications in a small package and also incorporate high voltage power supplies and measurement technology all in the same small enclosure.
Communications and Data
With real-time communications to cloud-based software, line powered compact recorders, outdoor rated weatherproof materials, and vast measuring capabilities, PMI brings the most innovative technologies to the field.
Communications are an important part of our product design and advanced antenna design, working with vendors before their products are even ready so that there’s as many communication possibility as possible to products, both for a safety point of view so the customers don’t have to enter a hazardous environment to access their data, but also from a practical point of view to instrument their system. They need to be able to access data from hundreds or thousands of devices simultaneously.
And from a data gathering perspective, once you have thousands of devices in the field, you need advanced and cloud-based big data analysis so that you can analyze year’s worth of data in a web browser. And we have advanced technology in terms of data processing, data storage, and data presentation to bring that to our customers.
Customer Support and Education
In addition to providing 24-hour customer service every day of the week, the company also offers continuing education classes and weekly white papers and webinars on industry trends, power quality issues, and best practices.
Our engineers provide technical support in many different ways, one of which is writing white papers, creating documents that describe events that could occur in a utility and explain how you can use our test equipment to measure these events, to help solve problems and create solutions on their own. In addition, the technical support guys and the engineering people provide webinars to discuss the white papers on an ongoing basis with customers.
Looking to the Future
Since 1987, PMI has helped electrical utilities and their customers to identify and address a wide array of power quality concerns. We are always looking to make our products better, as most companies do, but we need to also make them smaller, faster, more capable, and more cost-efficient. So we have, as a company, always looked at our future products as smaller than our current products.
And in order to do that, we have to go and look at the newest technology, and we are looking at faster processors all the time. We are looking at newer communication modules so that we can connect our devices more readily. And in some cases, we’re pushing the envelope with our own vendors to help them develop a product in the way that we can use it best. And I think that type of innovation is where Power Monitors stands out from our competitors.
For more information, visit powermonitors.com.
