Sensing opportunity

Ian Mitton, director, HP Utilities Industries.
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Are utility companies quick to implement this technology?
We are met with the usual utility response – which is slow. The decision-making process for utilities is very long-winded. Our technology is being bought by utilities worldwide, but once these projects start, they take a long time to roll out. Getting the infrastructure in place, to get the integration with the backoffice, that can take the best part of a year.

What is the latest innovation HP is pursuing in the field of smart grids?
Everyone is talking about smart grids, I’d argue in many ways the system is pretty intelligent already. Where they can improve it is in granularity. Here we are developing our CeNSE (Central Nerve System for the Earth) technology. The idea of calling it CeNSE is to mimic the human senses, so you’ve got eyes, ears, nose, touch, and apply that to the grid. We have started a first project using CeNSE in cooperation with Shell.

At the moment a sensor on a grid is a very expensive unit, costing about 2,000 dollars, If you could make a sensor for a few dollars, and pepper them out on the grid, then you’ve got much more granularity. That is what I think is going to be the next stage of the grid.

 

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We are talking to utilities in the US, Europe and in Japan about what can we use these sensors for. In Japan, for instance earthquakes are often followed by mudslides, which kill more people than earthquakes. If we put sensors on the wires, we would know when the earth starts to go.

How is your smart business in the Middle East going?
In the Middle East there’s not so much activity at the moment. We’ve been in discussion with a good few of the utilities, but nothings come to fruition yet.

How come?
Is suspect that it has to do with the return on investment. We have found in a good few cases that customers have struggled with that. They’ve thrown a couple of million dollars at a pilot, bought some meters, got some software, and plugged it all together. But this is usually led and driven by the meter department, and they are only looking at automating their current process.

What they haven’t looked at is the holistic approach, the benefits our software can bring to the whole organisation. Our systems can bring down costs for call centres, as utility companies are able to identify a problem with the end user as soon as it occurs.

They can also locate problems on the grid immediately, so that repair teams don’t have to drive up and down the power lines looking for the damage.

The reason why we haven’t been selling our software in the ME is probably for the same reason why many of these pilots have started and stopped, they can’t identify the return on investment.

Making sense
HP and Shell look to deploy new sensory technology in oil and gas exploration

At the International Petroleum Week in February, the two companies announced that they are working to develop a wireless sensing system collecting high resolution data to detect oil and gas reservoirs. Key to this project is HP’s CeNSE programme, which relies in developing tiny sensors, or accelerometers, which can be deployed in vast numbers.

“We have started our first CeNSE project with Shell, putting these accelerometers in the drill bit and putting them on the ground, so that you can triangulate and try and find where the best location for oil is,” explains Ian Mitton, director at HP Utilities Industries.

While the accelerometer gives CeNSE its “feel,” the system’s “taste and smell” are just around the corner, says Peter Hartwell, senior researcher at HP and project team lead. Researchers in the group are using nanomaterials to boost a standard chemical and biological detection technology to 100 million times its usual sensitivity rates.

That could lead to detectors small enough to clip onto a mobile telephone. With a wave over produce, the sensor could, for example, warn consumers of salmonella on spinach leaves or pesticides present in organic produce.

Deploying CeNSE would enable real-time data collection for a range of applications, says HP, such as bridge and infrastructure health monitoring, geophysical mapping, mine exploration and earthquake monitoring.