Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Project Issues Annual Report

Feb. 22, 2012 - PRLog -- The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project has released its first annual report outlining progress on the five-year, five-state project thus far. Contributions of project-level infrastructure participants, including interoperability testing partner QualityLogic Inc. (http://www.qualitylogic.com), are summarized, as is progress made by several utility sub-projects. The Project is expanding existing electric infrastructure and testing new smart grid technologies and will eventually reach approximately 60,000 customers in five states.

The Pacific Northwest team combines energy providers, utilities, vendors and research organizations, and the study involves metered customers in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.

Central to the Project is the transactive control system that provides two-way communication between smart devices that consume electricity and energy generators and distributors, and increases the efficiency of energy usage. QualityLogic is responsible for functional conformance and interoperability testing of this system and has developed test suites to confirm end-to-end transactive signal interoperability. After QualityLogic conducted a successful test of key system components and communications in April last year, the transactive control system is on target to “go live” in the fall of this year.

“QualityLogic’s work with the Project has helped set the foundation for how participants connect with one another,” said Dave Jollota, QualityLogic CEO and President. “We are proud of our work on this ground-breaking system, and we look forward to its continued success.”

The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project 2011 Annual Report may be downloaded at http://www.pnwsmartgrid.org/docs/2011_annual_report.pdf.

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QualityLogic was selected by the OpenADR Alliance to develop a conformance and interoperability test tool for OpenADR compliant products, and by Itron to develop and conduct testing for its ChoiceConnect® ERT® Certification Program. QualityLogic is the testing partner for the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration, the largest project of its kind in the U.S. The Company offers interoperability, conformance, and certification test solutions for other Smart Energy technologies and is an active participant in Smart Grid standards activities, including the OpenADR and ZigBee Alliance, OpenSG, SGIP, GWAC, MultiSpeak and others.

Departments ranging from IT to Marketing look to QualityLogic to ensure the quality of their websites, provide independent validation of competitive advantages, and develop and execute certification programs for their partners.