Smart gridAlstom acquires CA company, seeks to enter U.S. smart grid market

Published 25 March 2011

French electrical grid manufacturer Alstom recently acquired Utility Integration Solutions, Inc. (UISOL) in its efforts to expand its smart grid control room capabilities and enter the U.S. market; UISOL specializes in demand response management systems, which are critical to the operation of smart grids; analysts believe that this could put Alstom in position to become an integrated systems provider for smart grids in the United States on par with ABB, Siemens, and General Electric

French electrical grid manufacturer Alstom recently acquired Utility Integration Solutions, Inc. (UISOL) in its efforts to expand its smart grid control room capabilities and enter the U.S. market.

UISOL specializes in demand response management systems, which are critical to the operation of smart grids. These management systems allow power companies to control the amount of electricity sent out to various locations based on real-time demand, curbing waste and boosting efficiency.

UISOL’s DRBizNet is currently the leading demand response management system and its addition to Alstom’s portfolio provides expertise in an area that it previously lacked.

Jesse Berst, the president of the Center for Smart Energy and publisher of SmartGridNews.com, writes that this latest acquisition could put Alstom in a position to become “king of the control room” by brining “all the operational silos under one umbrella.”

This includes distributed generation, distributed storage, outage management, workforce management, and volt optimization.

Currently ABB, Siemens, and General Electric are the primary providers in the world for smart grid components and Berst believes that Alstom could soon be “a fourth soup-to-nuts provider on par” with the other three companies in the United States.

After Monday’s deal, Alstom Grid President Henri Poupart-Lafarge said, “We look forward to leveraging UISOL’s solutions and expertise to help utilities face the rising challenges of integrating a wider dispersion of Distributed Energy Resources in the electrical grid, and rolling out a cost-effective, standard-based Smart Grid<.”

In particular he noted the fact that the acquisition “[strengthened] our expertise in the integration and management of distributed energy resources and complementing our integrated Distribution Management Solution for utility customers worldwide.”