Akron trash trucks help test chips that monitor electric grid, prevent power outages

Chips that are being used to sense and remotely report flaws and failings in electrical grids were developed by the University of Akron, which worked with Exacter, a Columbus-based Industrial Internet of Things company.

Staff and students at the university, beginning in 2020, helped to develop the chips through state grants, reducing their size and cost from thousands of dollars each to $4. 

The chips were then installed on Akron’s waste trucks, which followed their daily routes through the city’s neighborhoods, bringing the chips in contact with more than 5,000 miles of electrical grid each week.

“We had 14 trucks running around Akron and ran it for two years to get two complete weather cycles — 500,000 miles on these sensors and not one failed — so now we have a product,” said John Lauletta, chair and CTO of Exacter. 

“It can tell you if you’re near a piece of electrical equipment that’s deteriorating. That could be a cracked insulator from a lightning strike, a transformer that’s going to catch fire, contamination on an insulator that could catch the pole on fire — all of these things can cause power outages.”

Akron Documenter Carol Sparkman discovered this story at the Jan. 8 Ward 1 meeting.

Company worked with city officials on how to go about testing

Lauletta worked with Samuel DeShazior, Akron’s Ward 1 City Council member, and Chris Ludle, the city’s director of public service, to decide which vehicles to mount the sensors on. They considered a range of vehicles, including police cruisers, but decided sanitation trucks were the best option because they routinely drive the same routes. 

“The problem is the grid is outside and deteriorating because of the load on the grid and the elements,” Lauletta said. “And you can’t put a sensor on every pole.”

From there, the data collected was given to FirstEnergy, which provides electricity for more than six million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York.

Anticipating power outages gives utility companies an opportunity to prevent them with necessary repairs and maintain service to their customers. 

“The public is the one that suffers when there’s a power outage,” said Barry Rosenbaum, formerly a senior fellow of the University of Akron Research Foundation, who wants the public to be aware of the affordable technology. 

The goal was to be proactive, not reactive.

“It was a benefit to all the Akron residents,” Lauletta said. “If this stuff could be headed off, we all know if we go out and fix something today, maybe we have a transformer ready to go and no one even knows there’s a disruption.”

Installing chips, collecting data

The program, which ran until 2022, demonstrated the viability of an affordable technology that Exacter hopes to use in municipalities throughout the United States. 

Exacter now works directly with waste management companies, paying to install the chips on their vehicles, then sells the data to utility companies that use the information to make repairs that prevent power outages. 

Exacter also began working with a Raleigh, North Carolina, data analytics company called the SAS Institute, which developed a software program to use data collected from the sensors. 

Following two years of testing, Trekker, the electrical grid monitoring technology piloted and developed here in Akron, hit the open market this spring. Exacter currently has a project in the Northeastern U.S. — Lauletta said nondisclosure agreements prohibit him from sharing a lot of details. 

“What I can tell you is that the project is a partnership of Exacter using our Trekker edge computing sensor and a new analytics platform from SAS Institute called Grid Guardian AI, which uses our Trekker data through a cloud interface.

“Together our technology and SAS analytics is changing how the grid is managed to improve reliability, avoid outages, and bring predictive maintenance to the utility industry.”