UBBA Plugfest will take place in Kansas City, MO at the Kansas City Convention Center from November 6th and 7th, 2024.

Plugfest Presentations will take place on Wednesday, November 6th from 8am to 12pm CT on three presentation stages in the Innovation Zone.

A Plugfest Recap will take place on Stage 2 on Thursday November 7th from 9am till 3pm CT.

The three use cases for Plugfest 2024 are:

Stage 1 – AMI 2.0

As Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) evolves from a focused revenue use case to a multi-sensor platform, the Plugfest Task Force will explore, educate, and demonstrate what is AMI 2.0 and how AMI 2.0 applications enable operational efficiencies to grid monitoring.

The task force will explore how AMI 2.0 brings value to utilities, such as transformer load monitoring, EV awareness, and more. The task force seeks to understand the impacts to cellular capacity for different LTE channel sizes (1.4 MHz, 3 MHz, 5 MHz), as millions of AMI 2.0 devices are deployed. The task force will also explore architectural alternatives, such as NB-IoT, CAT-M, or 5G RedCap and how these coverage extension technologies impact the ability to support cellular capacity demand. The task force is also interested in understanding how modifying operational parameters and configurations can extend battery life, decrease latency, and increase throughput for AMI 2.0 related use cases.

Stage 2 – Device Routing

As utilities transition to private LTE networks there will be several thousands of LTE devices deployed for distribution automation. Routing of all these use cases will be critical to ensure regulatory compliance, reliability, safety, and security.

The Plugfest Task Force will explore, educate, and demonstrate several routing and segmentation techniques for LTE devices serving distribution automation use cases. The task force wants to understand how tunneling, slicing, encryption, QoS, and segmentation are deployed and managed effectively. Examples could include, IEC 61850 GOOSE messaging, VLANs, NERC-CIP requirements, WAN resiliency, DER/DERMs, and others.

Stage 3 – Edge Computing & Low Latency

Moving decision making to the edge will be a valuable strategy for critical infrastructure communication. The Plugfest Task Force will explore, educate, and demonstrate how configuring devices and applications to make automated decisions in the field increase operational efficiencies, reduce costs, reduce latency, and increase overall safety.

The task force seeks to explore how applications at the edge can remain secure, how they are hosted, how they are managed, and what does “Edge Compute” really mean.