On March 1, Landis+Gyr hosted delegates from the East Africa Smart Grid Reverse Trade Mission at our Americas headquarters in Alpharetta, GA.  Organized by the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and Skipping Stone consulting, the mission is designed to connect U.S. businesses to new project opportunities in the East Africa region.  Over the course of the afternoon, Landis+Gyr’s product management and marketing teams showcased technologies and use cases that may advance the needs of the region’s energy industry.

The delegates represented government and utilities from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, and come from the transmission, distribution, operations, maintenance, and services backgrounds.  The discussion centered around how new technologies can improve their emerging smart grid goals, which included broad objectives such as fully electrifying their countries, and improving reliability and service quality to their customers in both the dense urban and rural areas. 

Each country has publicly committed to connecting their populations to modern sources of electricity and welcomed the opportunity to learn about new advancements in the industry around a multitude of Smart Grid topics, including:  distribution automation, operations and maintenance management, fault prediction, SCADA, smart metering, data management, renewable energy, data analytics, non-technical loss reduction, energy efficiency , and prepayment.

Prasanna Venkatesan, President and CEO Americas, welcomed our guests and introduced Landis+Gyr.  Following the welcome and introduction, Joel Sharrer, Jennifer Edwards, and Joey Alexander from the Landis+Gyr Product Marketing team presented our corporate and solution portfolio, Gridstream® Connect: our utility IoT platform, and enhanced outage and theft detection.  Andy Marshall, Practice Director of Distributed Energy Resources, discussed consumer solutions for a complex distribution grids, with particular focus on distributed energy resources and prepayment solutions.  The meeting was wrapped up by a product demonstration from Product Specialist, Olivia Meek.

“As a global leader in smart grid technology,” said Venkatesan, “we are grateful for the opportunity to share with the delegation how Landis+Gyr technologies are helping utilities across the world meet their modernization and development goals.”