Dive Summary:

• On-Ramp Wireless has been working on a Department of Energy project since 2010 designed to test the underground linking concept with partners Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.
• The company has also raised a total of $47 million, including major contributions from General Electric, NRG Energy, and ConocoPhillips via the trio’s joint Energy Technology Ventures group.
• On-Ramp is also working on other projects, such as a smart meter solution that aims to match distribution automation capabilities and various other smart grid initiatives both here and abroad.

From the article:

On-Ramp Wireless has a long-range, low-power, high-penetration wireless technology that it promises can do a lot of things -- including connecting underground, or “vaulted,” grid devices that other cost-competitive wireless technologies can’t reach.

Now we’ve got a Department of Energy report that appears to backs up those claims. On Wednesday, On-Ramp announced that a DOE-funded pilot shows its technology can network lots of underground grid assets, and that this in turn can help improve a key utility outage metric: System Average Interruption Duration Index, or SAIDI. ...