With a signing ceremony on the premises of GE’s Grid Solutions in Lisburn, GE and PhotonFirst announced a strategic technology collaboration. As the energy transition accelerates, reliability and optimization of key grid assets such as power and network transformers are critical, with real-time monitoring increasingly important to create smarter and safer grids. Fiber optical sensing based on integrated photonics offers exciting new opportunities to monitor the performance of transformers in a scalable, low-cost, robust and intelligent way.