Kansas City to Leverage Google for Smart Grid

Earlier this year, Google chose Kansas City (KS) to receive its ultra-fast, one-gigabit-per-second broadband Internet access. And a few months later its larger, better-known neighbor, Kansas City (MO) was also elected to receive the super fast service. The announcement by Google touted the fact that the company will be working with the Kauffman Foundation and the University of Kansas Medical Center to develop gigabit applications, but there is also another winner: the utilities.

The Kansas City Board of Public Utilities and Kansas City Power & Light will be able to leverage the superfast network for metering and potentially even distribution automation. After that, only the sky is the limit. “Google is on a rapid pace to try to design for not only Kansas City, KS but Kansas City, MO,” said Bill Johnson, Manager Electric Operations and Technology at KCBPU. “They’re trying to size up the infrastructure they'll be using from both utilities.” It obviously helps your case for cozying up to Google if you own the utility poles. The cities were both already looking into smart grid projects when Google entered the picture. KCBPU, which serves approximately 65,000 electric and 51,000 water customers, had already selected Elster for smart meters and eMeter for meter data management, but Google helped to expand the public utility’s smart grid vision.