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Friday, February 10, 2012

INL, Fujitsu announce smart grid collaboration

Fujitsu Laboratories of America announced Thursday a collaboration with the Idaho National Laboratory on smart grid energy management.

Under the project's auspices, Fujitsu's security and ad hoc communications technology will be deployed at the Center for Advanced Energy Studies in Idaho Falls to monitor building power consumption and generate vital data on energy utilization. The data they collect will be used as a baseline for measuring efficiency and security with regard to wider smart grid deployments.

Smart grids couple physical power distribution equipment with the IT systems that manage it. Security is essential, since compromise in one could affect the other. Fujitsu will contribute advanced security and cloud services technology from Fujitsu Laboratories of America and WisReed, an autonomous distributed network technology that enables the automatic construction of a network.

"The CAES facility is a certified Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design building, and we are trying to ensure we operate at maximum energy efficiency," said CAES Director J. W. Rogers. "Fujitsu's technology will provide us with real-time usage data to measure our efficiency and also supply our researchers with valuable information required for advanced energy system modeling."

"This collaboration will leverage INL's global leadership in industrial control and power system simulation test beds, and Fujitsu leadership in IT services," said Yasunori Kimura, President and CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories of America. "We are delighted to be part of this initiative by providing systems for real time data collection and cloud services for analysis and anomaly detection."