Over the past 10 years, Itron has developed, launched, scaled and continuously improved an industry leading distributed intelligence solution with integrated HW, OS, application platform, and high scale administration and management layer. This solution is now deployed at multiple utilities with millions of devices operating multiple distributed intelligence apps at scale, every day.
Itron customers are making transformational investment in new customer experience and grid operations programs, with projects that include AMI, distributed intelligence, data analytics, and advanced distribution management systems integration.
Real-world distributed intelligence field results and case studies from Itron customers have derived learnings ranging from valuable operational event detection heuristics to positive TCO impact derived from aspects such as energy and truck roll reduction.
Distributed intelligence operational experiences of early majority utilities in North America are positive and insightful:
- Tampa Electric Company (TECO) is making transformational investments in new customer experience and operational programs with supporting projects that include AMI, data analytics, advanced distribution management, work management, distributed intelligence, asset management, Volt/VAR optimization, smart streetlights and smart cities applications. Publicly available results of the TECO investments include the following.
- 72% improvement in restoration response from street lighting (10% from networked lighting controllers)
- Improved customer experience through proactive outage notifications, remote connect/disconnect, etc.
- 5K truck rolls avoided due to automated controls
- 55% improvement to system reliability
- 121M kWh reduced annually
Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is utilizing Distributed Intelligence in the meter to manage EV chargers in the customer’s premises in real time to maintain total load at any moment below the capacity of the premise service and within the remaining capacity of the service transformer. This utilizes both real-time connectivity from the meter into the home and peer-to-peer communications among all the meters behind the service transformer to evaluate remaining transformer capacity. This real-time edge load balancing program allows customers to utilize Level 2 electric vehicle charging at electrical services and behind service transformers that would not otherwise support it, saving the customer and the utility thousands of dollars in service and transformer upgrades per instance.
The most significant aspect of the business case for a DI platform is that the ROI expectation is not fixed at day one of implementation, based on use cases defined on day one of implementation. Instead, each new application downloaded to the computing platform stacks additional value on the initial investment, allowing ROI to grow continually over the life of the solution.
https://emea.itron.com/en/w/elfack-2025
Itron, Inc.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/itroninc
X: www.x.com/itroninc
Newsroom: https://itron.com/newsroom
Blog: https://itron.com/blog