Echelon Corp. has teamed with Oracle to help utilities better manage outages, protect revenue, offer demand response, and offer prepayment options. The Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway integrated with Echelon’s smart metering solution allows utilities to deploy multiple applications to manage their assets and customers.

“European Union member states are required to have 80 percent of consumers equipped with a smart meter by 2020,” said Bastian Fischer, vice president industry strategy, EMEA, Oracle Utilities. “Utilities need to act now even though regulations, standards and available technology will change, so they are looking for an open, multi-application solution that will grow with them over time.”

With an increasing number of outages and growing demand for energy and renewable integration, utilities need to manage new dynamics at the edge of the grid. Real-time consumption and generation information is needed to quickly diagnose and respond to problems and control devices. Flexibility is needed to deploy new customer offerings such as prepayment plans. In the combined solution, Echelon control nodes (data concentrators or Edge Control Nodes) running the COS Operating System aggregate data from Echelon meters or other smart devices deployed on the low-voltage grid. Echelon head-end based system software intelligently aggregates and pre-processes the data from these control nodes, where they are passed to the Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway. The Smart Grid Gateway then presents this data in a unified fashion to Oracle’s suite of applications. The result is a quick, easy and reliable deployment for utilities.