Increased electricity demand driven by electrification of buildings, vehicles and industry combined with aging infrastructure and climate change are causing dramatic operational, safety and reliability challenges for utilities. In urban areas this challenge is further complicated given the location and environment of underground utility assets. CNIguard’s SensorCore™ secure wireless industrial IOT solution provides real-time monitoring of critical infrastructure to detect potential manhole events including combustible gases, hot spots and thermal anomalies, and other environmental conditions. This actionable intelligence allows utility operators to prevent more damaging events including smoke, fire and explosive conditions that impact health and human safety, require unplanned and expensive reactive maintenance and impact grid reliability. The Sentir hardware sensing platform is fully ruggedized (IP68) and easily deployed in vaults or manholes. The device has multiple power options and utilizes any IP connection, currently secure cellular, for communications. All environmental and sensor data is visualized on the SensorView SaaS platform. Utilizing an advanced alarm management framework with artificial intelligence and machine learning a utility operator receives alerts and notifications to quickly respond and prevent potentially catastrophic events. In addition to environmental monitoring the platform is expandable to integrate additional sensors and use cases. Today the Sentir can also integrate underground fault circuit indicators to not only provide environmental monitoring but also outage notifications for electric faults on underground circuits. To find out more about CNIguard’s solution, visit www.cniguard.com