IoT in the Power and Utilities Industry

All Industries

IoT has become an important tool in improving power generation, delivery, and consumption providing solutions to help power utilities adhere to industry standards while keeping critical systems and data secure. On-premise data processing is key for accuracy of all data. OAS networking makes it possible to share data to remote client systems, while keeping the source secure.

Nuclear Power

The largest supplier of nuclear power in the US approached OAS in 2006 to solve a data transport issue. There was a need to share data within their 20 separate power generation facilities through network communication diodes that only allow traffic one way. The data was from OPC servers and needed to be shared to third party OPC clients outside of their secure network. OAS at the time already had advanced networking support for both OPC servers and clients, but OPC standard requires bi-directional communications. To solve this the OAS team developed a specialized one way networking feature incorporating a UDP broadcast. This feature can transport any OAS data source to any receiving OAS engine to share with any OAS destination. Since the successful adoption of this OAS networking feature in the power industry, the same feature has been used in other industries together with communication diodes to protect intellectual property and sensitive corporate data.

Power Generation

Another feature commonly used in power generation is data logging to archive data at specified intervals to meet county, state, and federal standards. With the OAS store and forward feature utilities never encounter data loss during a network failure or database engine failure. OAS Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) controls are commonly used to build advanced switch gear interfaces, to not only monitor status, but also calculate best load scenarios to assist power operators in choosing the best arrangement. OAS is used in coal, hydro, natural gas, nuclear, and geo-thermal power generation.

Renewable Energy

OAS has played a key role in renewable energy research and distribution. OAS was selected by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to monitor systems used to run tests on solar cell fabrication. The first in first out data processing that OAS implements to process all values, not just the latest value, provide the NREL scientists accurate data to determine what is the most cost effective and efficient method to build a solar cell. Using OAS the NREL team has successfully produced the most powerful solar cell for its size. OAS has also been used extensively by manufactures to bring multiple communication interfaces together like Modbus, OPC, OPC UA, and MQTT into a common platform. The data is then commonly archived, visualized, and for some customers also transported using OAS networking between continents over the Internet using OAS encrypted and compressed packets with one or more of the OAS networking features.

Power Monitoring

Many universities and large companies use OAS for power monitoring on campus. Power usage through the day and month is often calculated to display ratios of green renewable energy produced and consumed through web interfaces to the public. OAS is also used in data centers to monitor power usage of server farms, select OAS communication drivers being able to communicate to over one thousand devices per server.

Case Studies

See how current customers have taken advantage of the OAS Platform