Projects

For over 3 years, starting before Kinects was incorporated into existence, Kinects has embarked upon a stringent program of testing, including: in-house, third party and in-field, Utility backed Pilot Projects. We also have specific in-field, Utility driven R&D projects in progress.

In all Pilot Project cases results have exceeded initial expectations and parameters for both the participating Utilities and Kinects and, have contributed to the refinement of our KINECTS TRANSFORM©, KINECTS GRIDLINK© and KINECTS UTILITYSUITE© product lines.

The Kinects Pilot Program enables the Utility to experience, on a reduced scale all aspects of an actual implementation, including: planning, installation, monitoring and review processes.

Current Projects

Tennessee Valley Authority
Currently, Kinects is engaged with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) at two Utilities, one in Mississippi and one in Kentucky, with exclusive Pilot Projects for our KINECTS GRIDLINK© Smart Meter solutions including data presentment. These projects began installation in early summer of 2008 and will reach the 3,000 meter threshold by early 2009.

A key goal for the TVA Pilot Projects have been the assessment of KINECTS GRIDLINK© power line communications in both a rural and urban setting. Each environment poses similar and different challenges, including signal strength over long haul rural power lines. Because of our Patent Pending technology, we have been successful in transmitting and receiving our signal over the rural power lines over distances of 30km / 18.6 miles, and, we are confident that these distances will significantly increase with the planned evolution of our technology.

In the urban setting for one of the Pilot Projects, the test site is a college campus where students often change dorms, making it necessary to close a students electrical usage account and collect payment, which meant that a meter reader had to be dispatched to get a final reading and report the information back to billing and then the amount would be collected from the student. This process sometimes took several days to complete, making it a costly process for the Utility and inconvenient for the student.

With KINECTS GRIDLINK© Smart Meter products and communications and KINECTS UTILITYSUITE©, the Utility is able to access the current (within one hour) usage reading over our Internet based data presentment application when a student comes to the customer service department. The data is looked up, a payment is made and recorded and the student is on his/her way in minutes. The Utility saves the cost of sending a person to read the meter, the customer isn’t inconvenienced and everyone goes home happy.

Ontario, Canada
In Ontario, Kinects has three Pilot Projects and one R&D project in progress. The first Pilot Project is in a large urban location and focuses on asset management and revenue protection utilizing KINECTS TRANSFORM© distribution transformer monitors, KINECTS GRIDLINK© communications and KINECTS ASSETVIEW© and KINECTS REVENUEGUARD© data presentment and analytics application.

Large Urban Pilot Project

Asset Management
On one hand our Pilot Project Partner Utility wanted to address risk assessment and management of its aging distribution equipment. Faced with an onerous task that would take many months and hundreds of man-hours to complete, the Utility was approached by Kinects, and several months later the Pilot Project Plan was put into action. The Plan: install 20 KINECTS TRANSFORM© distribution transformer monitors to capture hourly readings of energy consumption, maximum and minimum voltage and current and operating environment temperature. The data would then be analyzed and compared against transformer performance and safety metrics for the purpose of determining risk and scheduling appropriate actions through their Capital Investment Plan and/or Operations Efficiency Program.

Revenue Protection
During the initial planning phase of the Asset Management Pilot Project the news of the project became known to the Revenue Protection Group within the Utility and Kinects was asked to present to the Revenue Protection Group our ideas regarding if and how our technologies could help them in their efforts to combat electricity theft and the identification of illegal use of electricity.

Kinects took time to learn about how the Utility was addressing the problems utilizing smart meter data analysis, and “in-house” methods for identifying potential theft and misuse and/or tampering.

After our analysis of the Utility’s revenue protection operations, smart meter data and “other” methods, Kinects proposed that by utilizing the planned Asset Management Pilot Project infrastructure we could address both sets of needs. Kinects proposed that by applying a reconciliation analysis between the smart meter data and the distribution transformer data we would be able to isolate variances between the two sets of data which would point the Revenue Protection Group to likely theft situations and by applying pattern recognition algorithms to the distribution transformer monitor data we would be able to identify usage patterns that would indicate high probability of illegal “grow-op” activity.

The Utility agreed to carry out both pilot projects utilizing the same Kinects infrastructure, thereby keeping their costs to a minimum. As with the Asset Management Pilot Project results the Revenue Protection Group was equally impressed with the resulting streamlining of their operations and the turnaround time reduction in identifying theft and illegal electricity use.

The Result
The results of the Pilot Project for Asset Management and Revenue Protection have met and surpassed documented targets. Kinects and our Pilot Project Partner are engaged in planning the second phase of the project: to increase the number of KINECTS TRANSFORM© distribution transformer monitors and associated supporting data collectors to over 100 units in three additional locations for a total of four locations distributed around the city. Further work will be initiated with respect to data integration, analysis, algorithm development and automated alarm state notifications.

R&D Investigational Project

Our urban based Utility Pilot Project Partner has commissioned Kinects to develop and test, in-field, a submersible distribution transformer monitor that in addition to energy consumption, maximum and minimum voltages and currents, and operating environment temperature (a key sign of wear and tear and/or capacity utilization) the submersible monitor will also monitor water levels and multiple strategic temperature points on the transformer’s casing, for a total of 8 values and one on/off notification state for water level in the vault. Optionally, harmonics and power factor monitoring are being considered for possible inclusion with this project.

Milton Hydro Urban and Rural Pilot Project

In late November 2008 a decision was made to accept a proposal from Kinects to plan, implement, monitor and analyze operational data from four KINECTS TRANSFORM© distribution transformer monitors and to have it completed with data in hand by January 9, 2009. The purpose of the Pilot Project from Kinects point of view was twofold, first, to test our ability to respond to the fast turnaround challenge, second, to initiate a working relationship with a leader in the implementation of Smart Grid technology and systems. From the Utility’s point of view, they were interested in evaluating the accuracy of the distribution transformer data, the potential uses of the data (asset management, revenue protection and grid connectivity mapping) and installation from a cost, line crew safety and service disruption point of view.

In addition our key contact, the Manager of Engineering, was scheduled to give a presentation at the EDIST 2009 Conference & Exposition in Markham, Ontario on January 15, 2009 and wanted to be able to talk about the future of “smart” devices using first hand experience and real data from within a Smart Grid implementation.

The Result
Kinects met all the following: timeline goals, the data accuracy needs and web presentment requirements of the data. The Utility was also impressed with the ease of installation of the equipment, safety considerations were surpassed and no customer service interruption during installation. As a result of this phase of the Pilot Project Milton Hydro is building a business case to support the implementation of Kinects technology within their Smart Grid system.

Going forward the Utility and Kinects have agreed to continue a working relationship that will include the expansion of the initial Pilot Project to include more locations, communications integration with their Smart Meter infrastructure and the inclusion of new products from Kinects into their Smart Grid implementation. In particular they are interested in our upcoming release of our overhead (pole mount DTM) and our Feeder Current Monitor product scheduled for later this year.