Blue Pillar recently announced the availability of its Aurora 5.0 platform, allowing facility operators increase reliability during power outages. With upgrades to cyber security, scalability, and data management, the updated Aurora 5.0 platform expands Blue Pillar’s capabilities in helping businesses that rely on critical infrastructure be more productive and energy efficient.
Aurora is the only IoT platform capable of connecting any Energy Thing behind-the-meter that measures, generates, switches or stores energy. By connecting all these Energy Things into a single platform with automated real-time monitoring and control, businesses can avoid outages while improving energy efficiency.
For providers of critical infrastructure services, energy downtime can be the difference between profit and loss, or even life and death. Organizations providing critical infrastructure services, including telecom companies, government agencies, hospitals, universities, and data centers, must maintain services even during power outages. And, because these organizations are also large consumers of energy, it is crucial they find ways to make everyday operations more energy efficient. Facing a slate of grid failures which grew six-fold from 2000-2013, increased energy costs, and a workforce that has an expected 50% retirement rate over the next 10 years, critical infrastructure providers can automate the process of collecting and controlling operational data while reducing energy consumption.
“Blue Pillar has been a fast-growing leader in the behind-the-meter nanogrid, microgrid and virtual power plant space in terms of total on-line capacity,” said Peter Asmus of Navigant Research. “Adding stronger security, scalability and data management into the Aurora platform will be fundamental as more facilities and service providers connect a more diverse set of energy assets to strengthen infrastructure resiliency and avoid grid failures.”
New enhancements to the Aurora 5.0 platform include:
Built-in end-to-end cyber security. Aurora 5.0 now includes several advanced features that extend the platform’s industry-leading security defenses. An automated defense-in-depth approach allows service providers to have built-in security from the sensor to the cloud. Third-party cyber security assessors have independently attested to Aurora’s best-in-breed architecture, which encrypts all data and authenticates all devices with keys that rotate every 30 minutes. The platform also logs access records, enabling companies to quickly monitor and respond to any threats.
Scalable to a global footprint. Aurora’s data aggregation model makes it easy to scale globally. The platform now enables integration with public and private cloud-based service with distributed data storage and support for multiple time zones. This provides the scalability needed to support multi-site deployments in geographically dispersed regions. Whether small facilities with limited-to-no IT infrastructure or vast campus environments, Aurora 5.0 automatically prescribes a best-fit network to reduce costs and eliminate complexities when integrating distributed sites.
Smarter data management. Energy data collection can generate enormous amounts of raw unintelligible data. Aurora 5.0 optimizes data collection with a storage methodology that puts big data on a diet. This approach accelerates access to information and insights while reducing storage and wireless communications costs for superior performance and out-of-the-box data management.
“Power Outages On The Rise Across the U.S.,” Inside Energy, August 18, 2016
Borlase, Stuart. Smart Grids: Infrastructure, Technology, and Solutions (Boca Raton FL, CRC Press – Taylor & Francis, 2016), 523
