If you work in the energy sector, integrating smart grid technology is among the most positive and disruptive changes that your company can make. A streamlined, integrated grid will track each of the renewable generation source's energy production levels in real time, which makes it easier to monitor your company’s entire system from one central location.

To vastly improve your advanced utilities monitoring system, you can update your smart meters and remote controlled grid systems with Over-the-Air (OTA) updates. When you configure your smart grid to receive OTA updates, you save time and maintenance costs. This ensures that your system is always secure and running the latest firmware. The days of manually updating your advanced utilities monitoring system are officially over

Updating Hardware and Firmware
When integrating meters and remote monitoring grid systems onto a smart grid, it is key to connect hardware and firmware. By integrating a module with a monitoring platform and configuring the platform for future updates, the system will run smoothly. To keep the process simple, it is important to unify the separate modules and monitoring platforms for each meter or grid device.

Advantages of OTA Updates
When you integrate these components into a single, end-to-end system and maintain your firmware with OTA updates, your grid remains secure. OTA updates to complete every modification on your system over a secure cellular connection allowing you to spend less time manually maintaining your advanced utilities monitoring system. This allows you to identify potential problems within seconds. With one interface, you can experience faster smart grid integration, which means that you can deploy your new system at a more rapid pace.

Real-Time Monitoring Means a Faster Response
Power grids tend to be clustered, with hundreds or even thousands of data points to monitor daily. Without real-time monitoring, hours are added to the process. Instead, when you fully integrate your smart grid with real-time monitoring, you can receive and process this data in a matter of seconds. This lets you respond to outages quickly, without the need to go through a third party to see and respond to your data. This process occurs on a rapid timescale—mere seconds instead of minutes or hours.

How to Build an Advanced Monitoring System Connected to Smart Grid 
Power panels are sensitive. Mechanical failures happen frequently and this fragile equipment requires regular maintenance, so you need to know exactly what’s happening in real time. Using cellular module firmware and alarm/event management, you’ll be equipped with everything you need to build your own advanced monitoring system for your smart grid. Alarms will notify you of any changes in your panels, delivering a bird’s eye view of your entire system on one platform. Since these features are encompassed within a single system, you can quickly see whether the problem is a module issue, a network issue or simply a weather issue.

With OTA updates included, you’ll never have to worry about whether you’re running the latest firmware on your smart grid, and you won’t have to start from scratch when you update your system with new technological advances.

Start with Sierra to create your own advanced utilities monitoring system.