Waveform-Grounded Control
Waveform-grounded control acts on what the power system is doing at full bandwidth, not on RMS averages or a model’s forecast. Continuous point-on-wave data from EQ Wave™, processed at the edge in deterministic, low-latency loops, lets control check every command from your energy management system (EMS) against the measured electrical state and carry out only what the system can safely support. EQ Syntropy™ helps your engineers design the strategies, coordinates them across assets and sites, and explains what control did and why.
Control is a licensed capability of the Energy Quotient™ platform, not a separate product: you add it to the EQ Wave and EQ Coherence™ installation you already run.
Power Quality and Control on One Platform
Today the stack is layered: power meters at the bottom and an EMS built separately on top, reading the meters through slow, coarse interfaces. A power quality analyzer usually arrives only after a problem calls for one. Energy Quotient flattens that stack, so measurement, power quality analysis, and control run on one platform from one measured record, delivered with sub-cycle latency. The same edge computer that runs your EMS software can show the harmonics it is acting on, and the primary control loops can respond to transients seen at 32 ksps instead of a meter’s averaged update. Deep power system control, waveform analytics, and optimization arrive as one bundle.
Flattening the stack also removes the integration work between the layers: less cabling, fewer communication links to configure, no data maps to keep in step across platforms, and one historian instead of several. Application design, factory acceptance testing, commissioning, and site acceptance all go faster as a result. With the waveform record in place from the first day, transients, harmonics, and oscillations surface during design and commissioning, and diagnostics for equipment such as inverters run continuously, so problems show early rather than as a service call and an analyzer installed after the fact.
Discuss Your Control Application
Talk through your microgrid, storage, or distributed energy project with an engineer.
Why Control Needs the Full Waveform
Power meters report metrics aggregated over at least 10 or 12 cycles, about 200 ms (the IEC 61000-4-30 interval), and their Modbus registers commonly refresh about once a second. Some power quality analyzers do not even refresh their registers at a uniform rate. Control applications need a faster, steadier view: EQ Wave delivers every sample to the gateway in about 8 ms, under half a 60 Hz cycle.
Control works from Continuous Point-on-Wave (CPOW) data from EQ Wave:
- Full resolution: EQ Wave captures every cycle at 32 ksps per channel, so control sees the transients, harmonics, and sub-cycle events that RMS metering averages away.
- Flexible processing: RMS, phasors, harmonics, and spectra are computed at the edge from the same continuous waveforms, so a control loop works from the quantities it needs rather than the fixed set a meter reports.
- Low latency: control loops are designed to run in under 10 ms on the gateway, independent of cloud connectivity.
Most systems trade waveform-level awareness for response time, or the reverse. The EQ platform delivers both.
What Control Does
Control continuously evaluates:
- EMS setpoints and objectives
- Waveform and power data from EQ Wave
- Equipment constraints and operating limits
- Grid and facility conditions
- Safety envelopes and detection thresholds
It resolves these into actions that are feasible, time-aligned with the measured electrical state, stable in execution, and repeatable across deployments.
A setpoint your EMS submits is a request, not a command. It is checked against the declared envelope, and the answer says whether it is feasible. Sending a larger number cannot push the system past the envelope.
Authority Tiers
Every EQ Coherence installation already observes and analyzes, with waveforms, metrics, storage, and EQ Sight™ always on. Control adds the authority to act, licensed in three ordered tiers that are a safety boundary first and a licensing boundary second. At the advisory and constrained tiers, adding control is a license change, not a new deployment; the protective tier also adds hardware.
| Tier | What it may do | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| Advisory | Computes and publishes setpoints and recommendations. Actuates nothing. | A control license |
| Constrained | May move setpoints inside an envelope you declare, and only in the safe direction. | A declared envelope, interlock specification, and fail-safe |
| Protective | May trip or act outside the normal envelope. | Deterministic egress hardware, a validated latency budget, and a per-site sign-off |
If a license, a hardware carrier, or the declared envelope becomes unavailable, control steps down the ladder rather than stopping abruptly: protective falls back to constrained, constrained to advisory, and advisory to observation only. Each change is logged and shown in EQ Sight, so a control system never goes silently deaf.
The declared envelope is part of your agreement with us, not a setting a site engineer can widen in place.
Your safety systems keep their authority. At sites with a PLC or SCADA, interlocks, emergency stops, and certified shutdown logic stay where they are already certified. Control supplies intelligence and bounded setpoints. Trip authority is offered only over the deterministic fieldbus path, never over a general-purpose network.
How It Fits the Platform
- EQ Syntropy works with your engineers to design control strategies, coordinates objectives across assets and sites, and interprets what control did and why. It works above the loop: the control loop itself is deterministic and never waits on AI inference.
- Control implements those strategies as deterministic loops on the gateway, alongside EQ Coherence.
- EQ Wave provides the measurement; the protective tier adds dedicated control hardware for deterministic actuation.
- Your EMS or partner logic keeps the economics and optimization, and interfaces at both the strategy and control layers.
Applications
- Energy storage dispatch: constraint-aware charge and discharge of battery energy storage systems (BESS), with real-time feasibility checking
- Microgrid control: unified sensing and control across solar, diesel, battery, and load assets
- Power factor correction: closed-loop capacitor and reactor switching based on live waveform analysis
- Voltage regulation: inverter VAR control and tap-changer coordination using CPOW feedback
- Compute power management: CPU and GPU power capping driven by measured load behavior in data centers and AI infrastructure
Who It Is For
- EMS vendors and OEMs that want a reliable sensing and actuation foundation instead of rebuilding one per project
- Independent power producer (IPP) platform teams standardizing BESS control, monitoring, and dispatch across a portfolio
- Distributed energy resource (DER) aggregators and virtual power plant (VPP) operators that need deterministic execution at the edge
- Microgrid developers that need consistent control behavior across diverse assets
- Data center and AI infrastructure operators managing compute power against measured load rather than nameplate assumptions
Control runs fully on isolated networks, including air-gapped and classified environments.
We have taken EMS and microgrid control projects through the full cycle, from design and factory acceptance to commissioning and site acceptance. Each control project is an engagement, not a standalone sale: we license the capability and work with your team from design through site acceptance. EMS vendors and OEMs can also partner with us to build on the same foundation; write to partnerships@eq.systems.
Discuss control integration
Talk through your application, authority tier, and timeline with an engineer.