EnergiMidt, a Danish co-operative utility owned by its customers, and Eltel Networks are jointly offering Denmark's first cloud-based smart metering solution based on Echelon's smart metering system.
EnergiMidt, one of the five largest electricity distribution companies in Denmark, has extensive experience with Echelon's Networked Energy Services smart grid infrastructure system. After deploying with Eltel 170,000 Echelon NES meters in 2009-2011, the utility found that it could achieve daily collection and hourly readings of load profiles consistently within a 99.7% to 100% performance range.
Echelon's Control Operating System (COS) software integrates with the meter data management (MDM) system from Goerlitz, a provider of telemetry solutions to European utilities. Goerlitz's MDM system plugs into the Echelon COS application framework enabling EnergiMidt to provide billing and operational support services to these smaller utilities and cities, allowing them to capture the economies of scale normally only available to large entities. Such hosted-service offerings are commonly called "cloud" services.
Last year, the first utility to piggyback onto the software running in EnergiMidt's data center was Bjerringbro. Next is Kjellerup Elnet. Like Bjerringbro's 3,000 customers, Kjellerup Elnet's 2,500 customers will receive Echelon's NES smart meters and related communications and control infrastructure. The rollout for Kjellerup Elnet customers is scheduled to be completed early next year.
The new offering from EnergiMidt and Eltel provides smaller utilities and municipalities one of the most cost-effective and quickest paths to achieving the benefits of a smart grid, including hourly meter readings, load control, remote connect/disconnect, better outage management and the ability to integrate water and gas meters into one common system with electric meters. This is particularly important for utility and city leaders who want to modernize grids but have limited resources to achieve their vision.
