Tantalus Systems

Pity the poor meter man. The guy who checks to see how much power, water or gas you’ve been using has to run a daily gauntlet of angry dogs and foul weather. And soon, if Burnaby-based Tantalus Systems Corp. has its way, his job will go the way of the chimney sweep.
 
The company, in the simplest terms, designs and builds communications equipment for utilities. Tantalus’s networking system, TUNet, gives utilities a two-way link between themselves and their customers. They can read meters remotely, from the relative comfort of their desks. But this is like saying the Internet is a way for computer users to connect. A “smart” network such as TUNet is the gateway to a whole suite of applications that should ultimately help utilities and their customers reduce consumption, increase reliability, and cut costs and greenhouse gases.

Some 30 utilities – 29 of them in the U.S., including in Anaheim, California, and a host of smaller municipalities – are already using TUNet to shed labour costs, instantly detect power outages and give customers detailed, every-15-minute breakdowns of their energy consumption. Gregg Kiess, the president and CEO of Tantalus customer Northeastern REMC, likes to tell the story of one homeowner who discovered his power bill was spiking at 2 a.m. “The parents were not home,” says Kiess. “Who was home were college-aged kids – and they had a hot tub.”

Most utilities start with these relatively basic applications, but in due time the same network will enable them to do much more. Customers will be able to program their appliances to operate when electricity prices are cheapest, or when they are powered by the greenest sources. They can agree to have their power shut off to certain devices when demand on the system is too high and be compensated by the utility for helping stave off a brownout. Homeowners will be able to sell power to the grid with rooftop solar panels, then buy power from the grid when it’s night and prices are cheaper. These are just some of the applications on the horizon.

Tantalus, of course, is not the only company trying to build the power grid of the future. The Smart Grid, as it’s known, has attracted US$3.4 billion from the Obama administration, part of its $862-billion stimulus package, to further prod a power industry already desperate to upgrade antiquated infrastructure. Big players such as GE, IBM and Cisco are all getting into the fray. Yet many utilities are finding that Tantalus can give them solutions not found anywhere else.

The word that Tantalus’s clients keep repeating is flexibility. Tantalus works with a wide array of communications platforms including radio, fibre optic, power line, cellular, WiMax, WiFi and more. Customers use whatever mode suits them best and change if the situation calls for it. And flexibility also means scalability: the ability to adapt to new technologies and applications in the future.

Wes Kelley is the president and CEO of Pulaski Electric System in the small-but-high-tech city of Pulaski, Tennessee. “We went through a full evaluation,” he says of his search for a Smart Grid supplier. Only Tantalus gave him the flexibility he needed. A third of his customers live in the small city of about 8,000 and have access to a state-of-the-art fibre optic network. But the other two-thirds live in the countryside, where the distances make fibre too costly and radio a more ideal solution. “TUNet enables us to serve both our rural customers and our urban customers on the same platform and the same software database,” he says.

It will be a gargantuan, capital-consuming task to modernize an American power system that Time magazine calls “a dinosaur – a leaky, money-wasting, carbon-dioxide-spewing system that remains shockingly vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks.” Canada’s situation is equally grim. But with efforts like Tantalus’s to bring greater efficiency to the grid, the future looks brighter – and greener.