Areva and Microsoft Team to Tackle Smart Grid Integration Efforts

Areva and Microsoft have extended their collaboration to include the development and deployment of Smart Grid management solutions for the world wide power industry.

You can read the full press release here, on Areva’s site for the details, but it’s worth noting from the release that our companies’ top areas of concerns are security and further integration of AREVA’s applications with Microsoft Office tools and enterprise business processes.

Areva is focusing on delivering applications for smarter electric dispatch, integrated distribution management, and demand response in order to offer the utilities the opportunity to reduce outages, shorten the ones that do occur, restore service faster, and new Smarter Grid capabilities including the ability to manage distributed generation and a variety of renewable sources of energy . All of these must be delivered in a secure fashion, in integrated formats that allow people throughout the utility to work with the information as it is generated. An early version of which was shown at DistribuTECH back in February of this year.

We continue to believe that tomorrow’s utility will require the type of integration that Areva (a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) and Microsoft are working to offer.

Toward that end, we can safely say that Microsoft based Energy Delivery solutions will utilize a wide range of MS products and technologies including:

As Energy Delivery Solutions evolve and become smarter to support the Smart Grid, we will see an explosion of data creating the need to visualize the information, apply analytics and business intelligence, and create collaboration among teams using the information in role based productivity scenarios. Our partners and customers are starting to move in this direction now as we are seeing the adoption of Silverlight, Virtual Earth and interest in the Azure service platform.

Consider the distribution management system that’s been developed with Areva. It’s built on Vista, WindowsServer 2008 and SQL Server 2008 and is currently being deployed at a large U.S. utility. The chart to the right indicates how it works.

We plan to have many more releases in coming weeks about our Smart Grid related work with partners. Great job, Areva! We’re happy to be working with you. – Larry Kuhl