IBM today launched a new coalition of utilities aimed at developing what the company is calling Intelligent Utility Network tools designed to improve efficiency and reliability of utility operations and give customers the ability to manage and use energy more efficiently.

The founding member of the coalition is CenterPoint Energy’s division in Houston, which collaborated with IBM on a new project to allow remote connection and disconnection of service and automated meter reads for customers. The Advanced Meter Infrastructure technology aims to help customers better manage energy usage by providing real-time price updates and the ability to remotely control energy-using appliances.

More partners in the coalition will be announced in the coming months, IBM officials said Wednesday.

“What’s different here is it’s really focused on creating solutions at the transmission and distribution level with utilities themselves, at the markets they’re serving,” Brad Gammons, director of IBM Global Energy and Utilities Industry, said during a teleconference.

IBM will provide a software platform for CenterPoint and other utilities to collaborate and share information about new technologies, Gammons said. Equipment providers, software companies and others will also be allowed some access to the collaborative platform.

It’s all aimed at meeting the challenges posed by aging transmission and distribution networks, the need to rapidly build infrastructure in emerging economies, environmental policies, an aging workforce, and increasing energy demands.

One of the key goals is to support open standards so the new technologies can not only run on IBM platforms but work with other equipment or software deployed by utilities, Gammons said.

CenterPoint is testing its new Advanced Meter Infrastructure with about 10,000 of its 2 million Houston-area electric customers, said Georgianna Nichols, president and COO of CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric.

The upgrades coincide with a project to make a “self-healing grid” that will provide data and analytics to detect outages and improve outage restoration times, planning and ongoing operations. CenterPoint is also using IBM software and middleware to deploy a services-oriented architecture that supports the automation and integration of business processes to improve service, reliability and efficiency.