Fortum, the largest utility in Finland and a leading energy company in the Nordic countries, has awarded an advanced metering infrastructure project to Telvent using Echelon’s Networked Energy Services (NES) system integrated with Telvent’s Smart Metering Titanium for 550,000 customers in Finland. Telvent is a value-added reseller of Echelon’s NES system. This project is the largest advanced metering deployment in Finland to date, where there are approximately 3.1 million electricity customers.

Revenue to Echelon over the life of the project is expected to be approximately $50 to $60 million, depending on the configuration selected. Volume deployments are scheduled to begin in 2011 and are expected to be complete by 2014.

Echelon’s NES system was selected by Fortum to meet Fortum's key objectives of offering energy saving and home automation programs for homeowners, as well as for the ability to provide hourly measurement of energy use to retail customers and bi-directional net energy measurement for customer-owned alternative energy generation.

"With the new smart meters invoicing will be based on real electricity consumption," says Timo Karttinen, Fortum's senior vice president for Corporate Development. "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."