SparkMeter Selected to Support Two Grants from the U.S. DOE to Enhance Grid Reliability and Resilience in America

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 health of distribution transformers plays a significant role in grid resilience and reliability, yet many U.S. utilities in rural regions depend on increasingly aged and undersized transformers to deliver electricity to their customers. As a result, utilities are struggling to predict and mitigate transformer failures to prevent power supply outages in light of more intense weather events, grid-edge renewables, and electrification.

Selected to support two of the eight projects awarded grants as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, SparkMeter will accelerate efforts to strengthen and modernize the nation's power grid by partnering with:

• 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 leverage 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 leverage 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). By working together, SparkMeter and its partners will enhance the resilience of rural distribution grids in the United States.

"Praxis streamlines the time-intensive process of data acquisition and analysis across three prevalent types of utilities, providing results within seconds," said lead ISU researcher Zhaoyu Wang, and professor of electrical and computer engineering. "This allows our research team to tackle this project on a much larger scale and focus on algorithms for utilities to better manage transformer health and predict their remaining useful lifetime."

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.

"By partnering with SparkMeter, our project team will be able to leverage data analytics to develop innovative methods to approach dynamic line ratings, reduce grid outages, and defer future infrastructure expenditures," said Justin McCann, VP of Engineering at WKRECC and co-PI of the project.

"Insights into transformer health and performance are essential to improving grid operations in the U.S., but utilities are facing limits due to the challenge of integrating disparate data sources – like smart meter data and data from grid engineering models. SparkMeter offers a commercially-compatible solution to harness data from these heterogeneous sources to help utilities prioritize and plan transformer upgrades and replacements," said SparkMeter CTO Stan McHann. "We're excited to collaborate on two critical projects that directly support the goals of the DOE to keep power reliable, safe, and affordable for rural communities."

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