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Echelon has been nominated to the next level of voting for Smart Grid News’ annual Smart Grid Companies to Watch competition. Out of a field of 54, Echelon is now one of 25 companies vying for the prize of being one of 13 Smart Grid Companies to Watch in 2013.
Vote for Echelon here. The polls are open until noon PST on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013. Thank you to our employees, customers, suppliers and partners for helping to elevate us to the next level.
After 9,000 votes for more than 140 projects during two weeks of voting, Postscapes announced its 2012 Internet of Things Awards – and Echelon was named in the Smart City Application category. Echelon was singled out for our Smart Street Lighting solutions.
Specifically, the awards site noted: “this lighting from Echelon allows a city to easily schedule lights on or off and set dimming levels of individual or groups of lights so a city can intelligently provide the right level of lighting needed by time of day, season, or weather conditions. Cities using Echelon’s solutions reduce their street lighting energy use by an average of 30% in addition to any savings from more efficient lights.”
Postscapes aggregates and disseminates information about the Internet of Things, which it describes as “the convergence of the physical world with the digital.” Its annual Internet of Things Award is meant to highlight innovations pointing toward the future of networked landscapes. The 2012 awards covered nine categories, including the Smart City Application in which Echelon was named.
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In the last few years we are learning that compelling return on investment (ROI) goals must be built into all smart grid project designs. As is the case with the Internet and with computing and communications in general, optimal ROI for grid modernization requires the installation of a multi-application software platform, sharing common communications and data processing infrastructures.
To succeed, however, this platform approach must rely on another non-technology trend: what I call the ‘de-siloization’ of departments within utilities, cities, and enterprises.
The inefficient notion of using one dedicated system for meter reading, another for outage detection and management, and another for distribution optimization – each in its own, relatively independent silo – makes little sense from an ROI perspective. “Invest one time, apply many times” makes much more sense than “invest many times and apply many times.” Again, we only have to look at trends in personal computers and smartphones – today they do everything from educate children to run business applications and provide design services.
To plan and implement multi-application platforms, organizations need to become flat and horizontal, not vertical and siloed. This means that meter shops work with transmission and distribution (T&D) shops, street lighting departments work with signal light people, and so on.
Enterprise data processing was siloed before the Internet came along, and now enterprises have a common platform that everyone has converged around. Smart grids need to go that way, too, converging around the multi-application platform approach.
To accomplish this will require some old-fashioned non-technology skills: departmental, functional, and executive vision and skill.
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The 2013 edition of Smart Grid News' annual poll of the top Smart Grid Companies to Watch has gathered nominations and is now ready to choose the 13 finalists. Echelon is on the list and wants your vote to make it to the finals!
For the past four years, Smart Grid News readers have nominated the top smart grid superstars. Echelon continues to excel in the smart grid marketplace, with successful smart meter deployments throughout the world – including notable recent expansions in China, Brazil, and Europe. We think we deserve to be recognized for our accomplishments, and we hope you'll agree.
Cast your vote now!
Brazilian energy customers will soon benefit from smart meter technologies, assuming the successful results of a pilot program from Echelon; our manufacturing partner ELO Sistemas Eletrônicos; and Eletrobras, Latin America’s biggest power utility company.
The 3,400-unit Parintins City Project is part of an innovative plan aimed at improving the everyday lives of the customers served by Eletrobras in the Amazon region. Installed smart meters – ELO’s dual-mode smart meters based on Echelon’s smart sensor and metering sub-systems – will act as sensors in the distribution network, enabling detection and immediate intervention in the event of a power failure or line tampering.
Eletrobras will monitor the data from the smart meters, which can communicate over power line (PL) or by radio frequency (RF) through Echelon’s exclusive Multipurpose Expansion Port (MEP) feature.
The pilot project will take place in Parintins, a city on an island in an isolated portion of the Brazilian grid, to allow monitoring of system performance from generation to distribution. This territory also has one of the country’s highest rates of non-technical utility losses, largely because enforcement is difficult in the remote region. To date, the 3,400 installed smart meters have enabled the project to meet its goals for reduced technical and commercial losses, increased security, and improved quality of service.
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Distributed intelligence is an important smart grid technology trend.
Currently, smart meters collect data and send it all via the Internet to a central data center for processing. That’s fine for things like trend analysis or billing, but what about for real-time control systems?
What will happen in the future, when everyone in a neighborhood with an electric vehicle (EV) arrives home from work at 6 pm and plugs in at the same time? An instantaneous peak could easily blow up transformers, especially if load information is all sent back for central processing.
But if the grid could recognize and sequence the EV plug-ins directly in the neighborhood, enforcing even very slight delays in when it begins delivering electricity for the plug-ins, you could avoid overloads. Because of the need for quick analysis and action, this kind of intelligence has to be available locally.
With distributed intelligence, data is captured at the edge of the smart grid, at the point where electricity is consumed. Remember, the best smart meters are also sensors. If their sensor data can be analyzed immediately, on the spot, decisions can be made about what’s important and what’s not important based on that data analysis. Information needed later or in the aggregate still gets sent back to the center, but only a fraction of the total data collected will need to be centralized.
Distributed intelligence is the direction the grid will go, and it will amplify the benefits of smart grid technologies.
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Last October, Echelon announced an important milestone in China. Our smart meter power line communications (PLC) and Control Operating System (COS) technology received approval from the China State Grid, allowing us to enter the Chinese market with our technology through our joint venture, Echelon-Holley. This is a significant accomplishment, as the State Grid controls roughly 90% of the 300 million meters in China.
Already, our joint venture has begun to win pilot projects in China. Holley Metering Limited, a leading smart meter provider in China, will use the Echelon meter modules in a 30,000 smart meter pilot deployment in Inner Mongolia, and later for a pilot in Fuping county, located in the Shanxi province.
A recent article in the South China Morning Post summarized the high points of Echelon’s penetration of the highly competitive advanced electricity meter market in mainland China.
China is a priority target for Echelon because high electricity theft levels and widespread shortages of electricity mean that smart grid technology is seen to have very high value. Our two pilot projects will allow the Echelon Holley joint venture to demonstrate the particular value of our technology, which can drive much broader revenue for us in coming years. Inner Mongolia alone is expected to add 10 million new smart meters over the next five years, while Shanxi province is also targeting 10 million new smart meters over the next three years.
Echelon’s approach to the market in China is significant because it builds on a local partnership (with Holley Metering). Establishing similar partnership relationships, tailored to the cultural and business environment of individual regions, could represent a model for smart-grid success globally.
More generally, due to fundamental challenges on the grid brought about by economic growth, the China market is significant. GTM Research reports that China plans to invest close to US$250 billion into its grid over the next five years. The South China Morning Post article cites market research from IMS Research stating that at the end of 2011, “just under 10 per cent of the world’s roughly 1.43 billion installed power meters were ‘smart,’ or communicating ones. This is forecast to double to 35 per cent by the end of 2016.”
It’s clear that China will need great smart grid technologies, which Echelon provides via our multi-application COS platform model. Our platform and our partner approach will also work well in other emerging markets in Asia and South America.
We believe that our recent milestones in China represent the tip of the iceberg for Echelon, and we’re optimistic about our prospects in this large, attractive, yet challenging market.
Recommended Links:
Echelon press release announcing China’s Holley Metering order
Article on Echelon in China in South China Morning Post
GTM Research: The Smart Grid in China, 2012-2016
Echelon and Holley Metering announce joint venture for China
Learn more about Holley Metering Limited
The technology for smart grids exists today. So what’s holding our industry back?
The biggest barrier to smart grid adoption, especially in the U.S., is the lack of stable regulatory policies and long-term mandates. A quick comparison with the Internet and telecommunications industries demonstrates what I mean.
The U.S. telecommunications industry in the 1980s had a single, strong regulatory body – the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – regulating much of telecom for the entire country. When, in 1996, the Clinton administration and Congress decided to pursue deregulation of telephone companies to create new competition, deregulation happened fairly quickly. This was largely because they empowered one entity, the FCC, to drive the process and negotiate with the states, Ma Bell and Congress.
In the U.S. smart grid industry, in contrast, multiple agencies split policy and regulatory responsibility. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)) is at the federal level, then each state has its own strong Public Utilities Commission (PUC). That means there are 50 different sets of requirements, terminology, lexicology, and time frames. No wonder it takes so long to get things decided and implemented for the smart grid.
If the U.S. federal government were to take a more active role in setting consistent energy policies and goals through the FERC, using its authority to regulate interstate commerce, this would create a more parallel framework to the telecomm deregulation that unleashed the Internet. States could then administer within this framework.
Then there’s the issue of standards. If only the smart grid industry could replicate how standards evolved for the Internet, where four entities determined 90% of the standards: the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA) handled the architecture, template, and global standards; the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) took care of physical communications and how things plug together; the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created the protocols; and the FCC provided much of the public policy direction.
For smart grid technology? Let’s just say there are many more entities in play here in the United States alone, and an order of magnitude more globally.
I think it’s the responsibility of everyone involved in the smart grid industry, and everyone who understands the promise of this technology, to work creatively to figure out how to streamline, harmonize, and simplify the regulations and standards for smart grids. Because the technology is there. We just need better, simpler, policy direction to lower the barriers to smart grid implementation.
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