Our nation’s utilities have a compelling story to tell—of transformation, leadership, innovation, and resilience. While building on an enviable track record of pioneering technologies and infrastructure, utilities remain focused on creating the future of energy that their customers and communities expect.
Achieving this future means tackling new challenges and realities. Confronting climate change by simultaneously decarbonizing the grid and electrifying the economy promises to be one of the great engineering and public policy feats of the 21st century. Developing and deploying proactive protections against the worst that Mother Nature and harmful actors can do may add cost and complexity.
Shaping the narrative around this transformation is critical. Regulators, customers, investors, and other stakeholders must understand that the resilient clean energy transformation is delivering tangible benefits—and is creating value at every level. In doing this, utilities will embrace a generational opportunity—and deliver lasting value for their customers, communities, policymakers, and investors.
Multiplying Efforts
Today, pioneering utilities and their leadership are embracing a digital foundation of broadband connectivity as the strategic enabler of cutting-edge technologies and solutions, centered on 900 MHz private wireless broadband networks.
Fundamentally, the modern grid requires modern communications. More than simply another tool, utility-controlled private broadband networks rise to the level of a third grid. This critical infrastructure complements the transmission and distribution grids, forming the intrinsic backbone of tomorrow’s energy system. They are the key to unlocking new grid capabilities, services, and solutions.
The 900 MHz movement is making broadband connectivity a reality for the modern grid, with enormous implications for every part of the system. This powerful family of technologies, all united and empowered by private broadband networks helps utilities to address their greatest challenges and opportunities.
Already, the expanding 900 MHz private wireless broadband ecosystem counts seven utilities that provide service across 15 states; more than 100 leading technology and service providers driving innovative broadband solutions for utilities and their customers; a Utility Strategic Advisory Board comprised of 10 utility executives identifying and prioritizing utility technology needs; strategic reviews and partnerships with EPRI, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Lab; a partnership with NRTC to deliver the benefits of 900 MHz broadband to rural co-operative utilities; and much, much more.
This growing partnership of leaders is driving a future for 900 MHz private wireless broadband that is as powerful as America’s utilities themselves.
Unlocking Unprecedented Solutions for Resilience
For utilities to accomplish their goals for grid resiliency, networks leveraging 900 MHz broadband spectrum offer significant advantages. These include robust security, priority access, low latency, redundancy, private ownership, and utility control of network access and coverage.
The technology ecosystem centered on 900 MHz is at work creating solutions that target utility resilience objectives, including:
Wildfire Mitigation: Reliable, low-latency communications support advanced grid technologies that help to mitigate and prevent wildfires. For example, falling conductor protection leverages private wireless broadband networks to de-energize broken distribution power lines as they fall, eliminating the risk of wildfire caused by live wires arcing on the ground.
Distribution Automation: Utility-controlled networks facilitate the flow of information among sensors, processors, and other devices to ensure that distribution systems operate safely, reliably, and efficiently. Every device must be in communication with utility applications to achieve the full benefit of smart grid technologies. Without private wireless network connectivity, when communications are down, devices return to default settings, thus increasing time needed to restore power.
Cybersecurity: When utilities’ critical communications use private wireless networks, which employ standards-based security protocols and utility control of network access, grid security is enhanced. Commercial carrier networks are designed to get users onto the internet, while a private wireless network gives utilities full control to completely isolate their network from the internet.
Smart Meters/Advanced Metering: Private wireless broadband networks can carry the data generated from advanced metering to give grid operators additional visibility into real-time grid conditions. Voltage control can be controlled at a circuit level based on real-time communications with smart meters.
SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition): Utilities can leverage their private broadband networks to carry SCADA data—their grids’ most critical, secure, and sensitive data—harnessing the inherent security and control features of private LTE.
Asset Monitoring and Physical Security: Private wireless broadband networks can connect grid assets in remote areas and difficult terrain, allowing utilities to leverage data to give real-time insight and secure operational control.
Mobility, Workforce Management, and Mutual Assistance: Utilities’ private broadband networks help workers perform duties safely and efficiently, giving them information and tools to provide the highest level of customer service while enhancing safety and reliability. And, if networks and devices are configured appropriately, crews requesting or responding to mutual assistance requests can operate seamlessly and securely on each other’s networks.
Artificial Intelligence: Utilities’ private wireless broadband networks provide artificial intelligence applications with large quantities of data in real time, which can be used to develop even more robust solutions to enhance resilience. Much of this data comes from sensors throughout the network. Utilities can deploy additional sensors with no additional operating expense.
Connected for Clean
Clean energy is more than an industry-wide trend—it’s a tectonic shift. And, for utilities, it is much more than good environmental stewardship. Sustainable grid operations can help to drive resilience as the sector addresses systemic risks to reliability like extreme weather, wildfires, and peaking energy demand at critical times of the day.
Further, as customers seek to enhance their own sustainability by using electricity to power their homes, businesses, and lives, electric companies are not merely the “provider of last resort”—they are the energy provider of first resort. As in every industry, meeting customers’ needs—for carbon-free energy, for reliability, for innovative energy solutions—is utilities’ foremost business imperative.
Once again, the utilities that have joined forces with the 900 MHz revolution are accomplishing their goals with connectivity-driven solutions, including:
Distributed Energy Resources: Private wireless broadband networks help utilities to orchestrate and to control distributed assets like private solar, energy storage, EV charging, and more in real time, while restricting access to the grid from the public internet.
EVs and Electrification: Economy-wide electrification requires optimizing grid performance for applications like EV charging. Real-time communication capabilities, enabled by utility private wireless broadband, allow variable charging time periods to take advantage of excess energy capacity windows and avoid high-demand periods.
Virtual Power Plants: These assets are intended to orchestrate diverse, distributed assets so that they may, in aggregate, perform like a power plant, requiring secure private broadband communications to achieve greater efficiency and responsiveness.
Data Centers: Grid planners and operators require real-time grid data and control, offered by private wireless broadband networks, to give insights needed to plan for and serve fast-growing and resource-intensive loads like data centers.
Building on a Strong Foundation
The utility sector is inherently flexible, collaborative, and innovative. Historically, utilities have showcased their collective strength in deploying critical energy infrastructure and providing reliable service that has delivered exceptional value to customers and communities. Building on this legacy with a grid optimized by broadband connectivity—as the utilities who have joined the 900 MHz private wireless movement are doing—will unlock a brighter energy future for customers.
To successfully transform the grid—giving customers and communities an energy future that is cleaner, more intelligent, more resilient, and more secure—utilities must leverage their established culture of connection and teamwork. They can, and must, do all this while also driving electrification and economic growth—and also keeping social equity and energy affordability as cornerstones of this transformation. Connectivity is crucial to making all this happen.
Fortunately, utilities have a clear vision for the future, centered firmly on delivering enhanced sustainability and resilience. The industry's commitment to advancing security, preparedness, and resilience has never been stronger—and at the same time, carbon emissions from the U.S. electric power sector are as low as they were nearly 50 years ago, while electricity use has more than doubled.
These trends are complemented by the strong rise in electrification—which is accompanied by forecasts calling for even more growth driven by data centers, artificial intelligence, electric heating, electric transportation, and the renaissance of domestic manufacturing.
Enabling this transformation requires tremendous investment. Despite the headwinds of higher inflation and interest rates, the electric power sector continues to make record-high capital investments: more than $1 trillion by U.S. investor-owned electric companies, including about $170 billion in 2023 alone, according to the Edison Electric Institute.
Utilities and their stakeholders must embrace the technologies and solutions that an ecosystem of trusted partners can provide. By doing so, they can maximize the value of their infrastructure investments and better manage and support them to transform our energy economy.
Accelerating a Connected Resilient Future
The utility sector has a strong history of united action in addressing complex challenges. The 900 MHz private wireless movement embodies this spirit, dedicated to enhancing critical energy infrastructure through connectivity and fostering a resilient clean energy future.
Over the decades, the utility industry has consistently demonstrated its ability to overcome obstacles. From the initial electrification of the nation to building the modern grid, powering technological and economic advancements, and responding to environmental challenges, utilities have proven their resilience and adaptability.
Building on this legacy, the industry will continue to thrive through collaboration, communication, and interconnection. By harnessing private wireless broadband networks, utilities are executing a bold strategy to deliver a cleaner, safer, more affordable, and more secure energy future—driven by unlocking innovation and value.