Company: Tollgrade Communications, Cranberry, PA
Company Description: With more than 200 million lines under test and 25 years of experience successfully locating faults at the world’s largest electric utilities and telecommunication providers, Tollgrade is redefining the global standard for reliability. Our award-winning fault detection solution is deployed on four continents to restore outages faster.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Asset Management Solution

Nomination Title: Tollgrade LightHouse Predictive Grid(R) Analytics

1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

The electric grid is the unsung hero of our economy. Delivering reliable power to homes and businesses allows us to prosper. But our aging, 100 year old electricity grid is starting to break down. Aging assets on the grid are reaching their end-of-life and causing 25% of our outages. The average U.S consumers lose power 214 minutes a year, costing as much as $200 billion annually. With outages on the rise, this is taking a bigger toll on our economy.

From the 2013 Superbowl outage to Super Storm Sandy, it’s clear our 100 year old electricity grid lacks the intelligence to effectively respond to power outages in a way that meets our 21st Century needs. In the U.S., the distribution network is the largest part of our electric grid spanning 6.6 million miles – that’s like going to the moon 13 times and back. According to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), it’s also where over 90 percent of the outages in the U.S. occur. Yet, it largely unmonitored and there is very little data or real-time situational awareness to aid utilities in the delivery of electricity or restoration of power.

Today, there is 100 times more information gathered by Facebook or a real-time traffic app than the distribution grid – the infrastructure that delivers the energy these applications (and our economy) rely on. With real-time data we can better predict traffic or the weather, but what if we could better predict the grid?

In 2013, Tollgrade introduced its LightHouse 3.0 platform with Predictive Grid® Analytics – the first asset management platform for utilities to provide real-time grid intelligence from their blind spot - the 6.6 million miles of the distribution grid responsible for the delivery of electricity. Our software monitors the distribution network to give utilities real-time information to predict outages and failures of their assets before they occur. By providing this real-time information remotely, we’ve helped utilities avoid outages, respond to outages faster and eliminate thousands of miles of truck rolls (and greenhouse gases). Duke Energy, North America’s largest utility and our largest customer, has seen a 2.6% improvement in their American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) score since deployment.

At Toronto Hydro LightHouse saved 550,000 outage minutes in its first year and according to Ivano Laboricca, Vice President of Asset Management, “From an asset manager’s perspective, this technology will allow us to know immediately if there is a problem that is easy to fix or if it is a serious problem that requires capital investment.”

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2. Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Tollgrade’s CEO, Edward H. Kennedy has been the impetus to push the company to introduce Predictive Grid® Analytics. As a driver of global telecommunication transformation, Ed is recognized for his ability to build innovative, high-growth companies. Probably best known as the CEO and President of Ocular Networks, a company he co-founded and sold in less than three years for $355 million dollars to Tellabs, Ed was lauded by Forbes for executing one of 2002’s top high-tech deals. Ed is putting his experience transforming the telecommunications industry to work by helping utilities modernize the grid.

In 2013 Tollgrade was named market share leader by IHS Research, “Smart Grid Product of the Year” and expanded deployments to three continents growing the business by 500%.