Hello readers!

This week, we're talking about edge sensing on the power grid, offline-first connectivity, and more!

The hardest failures for a utility to catch are the ones that don't break anything. A tree limb leans into a line, or a downed conductor rests on dry ground, and current keeps flowing at a level too low to trip a breaker. These high-impedance faults can sit undetected until they clear on their own — or start a fire. Conventional protection systems are built to react to a circuit that has already failed, which leaves this category mostly invisible until it escalates.

A newer class of monitoring hardware is aimed at that gap. Gridware's pole-mounted sensors read vibration, sound, and the electrical field around a span rather than tracking current on the conductor itself. Current-based sensors register a problem once a fault draws enough power to show up; environmental sensing can pick up the physical signature of a leaning tree or a cracked pole before any electrical anomaly appears downstream. The devices run on solar power, install with four screws in under ten minutes, and spend their first few days learning a pole's normal background — a passing garbage truck, wind on the line — so routine noise doesn't generate false alarms.

Sensors go on every other pole, and because the conductors tie each unsensored pole to its neighbors, a disturbance on that span shows up on the instrumented poles flanking it. Comparing the two readings locates the fault along the line rather than merely confirming one exists somewhere on a multi-mile circuit. That inverts the standard field workflow, in which a crew responds to an outage by driving to the source-side device and patrolling the line until they find the break. Detection also happens on the device: each unit does its own anomaly analysis at the edge and sends an alert, instead of streaming raw data to a control room for interpretation.

Utilities have been improvising versions of the same idea with hardware already in the field. Akron, Ohio, mounted IoT sensors on municipal garbage trucks so that ordinary collection routes would pick up radio signals from pole-mounted grid components; the data flagged a failing isolator in time to prevent an outage that would have hit nearly 300,000 people. Nasushiobara, Japan, went the other direction during a 2022 earthquake-driven supply crunch, dimming hundreds of networked streetlights to shed load directly rather than waiting for the strained grid to fail somewhere. Both are the same instinct as the pole sensors — instrument the distribution network densely enough to see trouble forming — executed with whatever was cheapest to connect.

Several states are tightening reliability and wildfire-prevention rules, pushing utilities toward systems that flag hazards before they escalate, while data-center growth, EV charging, and rooftop solar are all loading distribution circuits that were never sized for them. Dense sensor coverage is cheaper and faster to deploy than rebuilding lines, which makes it an attractive way to direct spending toward the segments most at risk. It also feeds the self-healing grid designs utilities have worked toward for years, where distributed sensors isolate a fault and reroute power automatically. The tradeoff is that every one of these devices is another networked endpoint on infrastructure built long before anyone treated a utility pole as an attack surface, which is why sensor rollouts and grid cybersecurity budgets tend to grow in step.

The installed base is still thin. Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. distribution poles currently carry advanced sensors of any kind. Gridware alone now works with close to 30 utilities — including Xcel Energy, Con Edison, and Duquesne Light in Pittsburgh — that collectively serve roughly 40 percent of U.S. electricity customers, and industry forecasts point to tens or hundreds of thousands of new sensor nodes across North America in the next few years. Most of the grid still runs on periodic inspection and after-the-fact fault response, with continuous per-span monitoring covering a fraction of it.

Imagine an autonomous inspection robot making its way through a solar farm hundreds of miles from the nearest city. Equipped with cameras, environmental sensors, and AI models trained to identify faults before they become failures, it’s designed to inspect hundreds of panels without human intervention. However, halfway through its route, cellular coverage drops.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Wienke Giezeman, CEO and co-founder of The Things Industries, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss how IoT is finally delivering what it promised ten years ago. The conversation covers what changed technically and commercially, the ROI of IoT, why deployments failed in the early days, criticism of IoT, what companies still get wrong about LoRaWAN, and The Things Conference 2026.

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