Itron, Inc. announced that it signed a contract with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to improve grid awareness and reduce operating costs. Harnessing the power of intelligent connectivity at the edge, LADWP will deploy Itron’s Industrial IoT network and Distribution Automation (DA) solution with the goal of modernizing its grid. The largest municipal water and power utility in the nation, LADWP provides electricity to 1.5 million residential and business customers. Increasing grid reliability, Itron’s DA solution will equip the utility to quickly identify problems, make decisions in real time, automate outage resolution and reduce truck rolls. The solution will enable the utility to reduce operating costs by extending monitoring and control capabilities to a broad range of distribution devices on its electric system. By deploying Itron’s highly reliable, low latency communications network and DA solution, LADWP will strive to further improve customer satisfaction. The California utility expects to use Itron’s network to unlock the full potential of Industrial IoT, creating opportunities to add smart city applications to the network as future needs arise.