Municipals & Cooperatives

Most Muni’s and Co-op’s have very different business requirements than their larger cousins, Investor Owned Utilities. Typically, they have much smaller engineering staffs, smaller IT infrastructures and smaller operating budgets. Additionally, they have a need to pay for things as the ROI is returned rather than up front with a larger budget outlay. In most cases, they simply operate in a smaller way but they are also able to make decisions more quickly. If an IOU makes a decision within twelve months, a Muni or Co-op can make the same decision within one to two months. GRIDiant recognizes this and has designed two solutions: one for Muni’s and Co-op’s and another one for IOU’s. In both cases, the utility company gets the full solution set within the GRIDmaster product but for Muni’s and Co-op’s, we deliver the product in a hosted environment called SaaS, Software as a Service.

When we are fortunate enough to win your business, we assign a three person project team comprised of a Project Manager, a Power Engineer and a System Engineer. We sit down with your project team and define your objectives (both functional as well as financial) and then we work with you to define the scope of the project. A key component of this effort is the determination of the data input from your operation that GRIDmaster will have access to for calculation purposes. This data can come from an Outage Management System (OMS), Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition system (SCADA), Geographic Information System (GIS), Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Meter Data Management System (MDMS), Load Management System (LMS), Energy Demand Response Management System (EDRM) and other data input systems. The more data we have the better GRIDmaster can perform. After that, our Power Engineer will work with your team to define the configuration of network model that has to be built for GRIDmaster to work properly. This takes about two months of a four month project timeline. The last two months are used by our Systems Engineer to physically configure the system. This is not a custom coding effort but more like PowerPoint where we select options inside the software to tailor your GRIDmaster system to your needs but without re-developing the software itself. During this process, we will put your operators and engineers through our training programs either at our training facility in Raleigh, NC or at your site.

Once the system has gone through its Quality Assurance stage followed by its off-line testing stage, the system is now ready to go live. We use a highly secure off-site server to host the system so that your entire access is via the WEB or you can host the system yourself. We do this slowly and our power engineers and system engineers will be there to work with your people to make the project successful. In either case, our two companies would enter into a three year contract where you pay us an agreed upon fee every month for the use of our software. This fee is determined by what options you chose in the software as well as the number of users you have within your operation that would be using the system. With SaaS, you never have to provide IT infrastructure (servers or extra communication equipment) and you never have to worry about systems upgrades or maintenance. This is all covered by your monthly rate. Most Muni’s and Co-op’s really like this solution because they get all the power of GRIDmaster but they only have to pay for it on a monthly basis.