Echelon extends its project winning spree in Europe

Sustaining its project winning spree, Echelon Corporation has bagged a smart metering project in France. The development follows recent contracts in Germany and Denmark.

The company shared that the Group of Electricity Distributors in France (GAELD), a consortium of electricity distributors, has chosen Echelon's Networked Energy Services (NES) System for up to 90,000 homes.

The project, awarded to Echelon partner Alter Way, is expected to begin within the next few months and to be completed by 2013.

One of the utilities in the GAELD consortium, Régie d'électricité de Loos, is allowing homeowners to sell back solar produced electricity to the utility. They are doing so using the ability of NES meters to measure the amount of electricity produced separately from the energy consumed, as opposed to simple "net metering" in which the details of production versus consumption are lost, making this the first instance of Echelon's meter to be used in an alternative energy application in France.

Echelon's NES advanced metering infrastructure consists of advanced electronic electricity meters, accessed via a web services based network operating system over an IP networking infrastructure. Multiple NES meters can share a single IP connection through the use of Echelon's power line networking technology.

According to the company, this decreases the per-point connection cost, enabling the system to easily and cost-effectively incorporate new wide area networking technologies over the life of the system.