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Echelon Corporation has entered into a technology licensing agreement with ELO Sistemas Eletronicos (ELO) under which ELO will develop and market smart electricity meters based on Echelon’s Networked Energy Services (NES) smart grid infrastructure solution.

The parties intend to initially focus on the Brazilian and select Latin American smart meter markets, representing over 100 million electricity meters. ELO is the leading supplier of digital electricity meters in the Brazilian market, with an estimated 40% market share.

In October of 2009 Brazil’s energy regulator, Aneel, announced tentative plans for a nationwide rollout of smart metering, expecting to replace approximately 63 million electricity meters in the country with smart meters by 2021.

From various sources

Vattenfall completed the installation of 850,000 electricity meters in 2009.

600,000 of these were Echelon NES PLC meters installed by Telvent, who have also provided the enterprise software.

Echelon has announced a new suite of products to support smart grid activities

It includes the introduction of an IP-based smart meter for the North American market that brings IP connectivity inside a meter for smart grid metering systems.“The new meter is a powerful, intelligent end-point for the smart grid and an integral part of Echelon’s enhancements to its Networked Energy Services (NES) smart metering infrastructure.”

The new NES Smart IP Meters combine three key elements of an intelligent grid infrastructure in a single ANSI standard-based meter – IP-based wide-area network (WAN) connection, extremely reliable power line-based communications, and neighborhood meter network management. The new meters can increase a utility’s installation flexibility and lower cost by allowing them to locate the backhaul connection for each neighborhood at the side of a single home.

With the NES System, backhaul providers such as T-Mobile North America supply and maintain the backhaul network and the meters utilize the existing low voltage power lines to provide high speed, reliable and secure neighborhood communications with no new network build-out. The new IP meters have an open interface designed to accept any IP-capable WAN card, such as GPRS, UMTS, LTE, CDMA, EV-DO, WiMAX®, fiber optic, DSL, and Wi-Fi® – giving utilities the ability to work with any mobile carrier or WAN service provider in North America.

The powerful data concentrator built into the NES Smart IP Meter serves as the intelligent hub for the neighborhood meter network by providing management services, including meter and smart device discovery, mesh communications management, and operations monitoring.

The intelligence provided by the NES Smart Meter is designed to enable and accelerate key smart grid applications including:

• Time of Use Metering;
• Load Profiling;
• Demand Metering;
• Power Quality Analysis and Verification;
• Prepaid Metering;
• Integration with Home Area Network via RF such as ZigBee; and
• Micro-generation/renewable energy metering (e.g., solar).

The new smart grid products include:

• software to support and manage deployments
• new data concentrators
• new meters as detailed above
• ecosystem – i.e. support for appliances, devices and meter components to ‘plug and play’ with the NES system

Press release about smart grid products

Press release specifically about the meters

Duke Energy has selected Ambient Corp. to provide communications technology for the impending implementation of smart meters in its’ service territories.

Exact details of value or volumes were not included in the announcement.

It is expected that Ambient will provide communications from concentrators, as Duke favour Echelon’s PLC based metering – however, both technologies can co-exist and could complement each other to give the most effective and efficient coverage.

Coverage at greentech media – which suggests that Duke will also announce a partnership with Cisco

Two exercises are underway in Upper Austria.

Energie AG has installed around 10,000 meters, with an aim of reaching 100,000 by the end of 2010 (and possibly 400,000 in total by 2014). They are using the Siemens AMIS system, which uses PLC

Linz Strom AG have undertaken a project to install 75,000 echelon based meters, with an option to install a further 75,000.

From googlemap and research

From google alert Coverage More Coverage

The largest smart metering programme in Finland, incorporating 550,000 customers has been announced by Fortum. Telvent will install Echelon NES metering from 2011 to 2014. The cost of the meters is believed to be $50 to $60 million.

The PLC based meters will include ZigBee functionality.

“With the new smart meters invoicing will be based on real electricity consumption,” says Timo Karttinen, senior vice president for corporate development at Fortum.  “Better knowledge in turn improves energy efficiency and makes it easier to operate and manage network capacity when actual customer electricity consumption is known.  In addition, the smart meters will be used for faster power failure resolution and as a platform for future services within electricity solutions.”

From googlemap

Jan 08

Danish Utility contracts with Echelon to install NES based electricity meters to 50,000 danish homes.

Will use a variety of WAN comms solutions for backhaul including WiMAX and GPRS.

Project to run from Q4 07 to 2010

From googlemap

Danish utility installing 52,000 Echelon meters.

Project delivery by Eltel Networks due to start in late 2008 and complete in 2011. Backend systems being provided by Gorlitz.

From original googlemap

Danish utility installing 390,000 Echelon meters.

Project delivery by Eltel Networks due to start in late 2008 and to complete in 2011. MDM and other tools are being provided by Gorlitz.

From googlemap

Danish Utility agrees $18m contract with Echelon to provide smart metering and associated software and services for its’ 170,000 customers.

Shipments to start in Q4 08 through to 2010