Largo, Florida – September 13, 2011 – Beckwith Electric, a leading power and automation technology company, and Tropos Networks, a market leader in wireless IP broadband mesh networks, announces successful completion of interoperability testing for their products used to create smart grid solutions for utilities. The interoperability testing demonstrates the importance in adoption of industry standards and collaboration between vendors to help utilities build highly reliable, self-healing smart power grids.
“The interoperability between Beckwith Electric’s distribution automation products and Tropos Networks is great News for utilities,” said Mark Dixon, Beckwith Electric Director of sales and marketing. “It validates Tropos’ wireless, high-speed, broadband mesh as a reliable foundation for building WAN smart grid communications for a wide range of mission critical smart grid applications. We look forward to building on a successful and innovative partnership between Beckwith Electric and Tropos Networks.”
This partnership will provide utilities with a highly reliable, intelligent distribution automation solution. Beckwith Electric’s LTC control, voltage regulator and capacitor bank controls incorporate the latest high-speed, true Ethernet communications technology providing data logging files, events files, and oscillography. Tropos’ GridCom connects to Beckwith Electric controls to communicate information over the GridCom network, back to a local substation host computer or back to the SCADA Control Center.
The interoperability testing validates the interoperability and performance of Beckwith Electric’s distribution automation products and Tropos’ GridCom. Smart grid distribution automation applications require a reliable, secure, multi-megabit, and low latency IP communications network which Tropos and Beckwith products deliver.
“Our partnership with Beckwith Electric is an exciting development for utilities worldwide making an investment in modernization and automation,” said Rob Pilgrim, Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at Tropos. “We look forward to continued collaboration as we help utilities build smart networks to support a wide range of smart grid applications.”
Tropos’ GridCom is a standards-based mesh network for smart grid WAN communications, incorporating reliability, security, scalability and multimegabit broadband performance to enable aggregation of multiple smart products and applications over a single cost effective network. GridCom solutions are available in 2.4 GHz and other unlicensed and licensed bands.
About Beckwith Electric
Founded in 1967, Beckwith Electric introduced the first solid state tapchanger control in 1968, and was the first to develop the microprocessor protective relay in 1981. Today, Beckwith Electric has thousands of protection and control units in service worldwide, with a reputation for cutting-edge technology, defined by its customers and refined by Beckwith. This success starts with Beckwith Electric Employees and their commitment to quality in the products, all 100% designed and manufactured in Largo, Florida, U.S.A.
Beckwith’s field-proven smart distribution automation controls for transformers, regulators and capacitor banks incorporate unique control strategies, advanced microprocessor architecture and cyber security compliant communications. Power systems protection solutions include generator, transformer, feeder, recloser and distributed generation applications. Specialized synchronizing and motor bus transfer systems are also offered.
Beckwith Electric’s customers include power utilities, heavy industrial and large institutional markets, and their consultants.
Visit Beckwith Electric online at www.beckwithelectric.com, follow on Twitter at Twitter.com/beckwithcompany or connect on Facebook at Facebook.com/BeckwithElectric.