Smart Grid

Elster leads the Voltage Conservation Alliance (SGVCA) with ABB and Survalent in field study with Entergy Gulf States Louisiana. The SGVCA will focus initially on an end-to-end voltage conservation program with a two-fold goal of enabling operational efficiency for utilities and advancing the business case for voltage conservation. After the completion of the pilot, the findings will be expanded to drive commercial application for all utilities.

Elster designed its innovative BK-G4E and AS330 meters specifically to support tailored solutions for utilities working to comply with the European directive for smart gas and electricity metering. The meters comply with the latest industry standards for data privacy and security and provide customers with latest technology to protect against fraud and tampering.

"Elster has worked closely with us to support the success of our Smart Metering rollout and their secure, reliable and interoperable dual fuel, 'dual protocol WAN' solution provides us with further capacity in our supply chain." Dean Keeling, managing director of British Gas smart homes

Idaho Falls Power, which services the City of Idaho Falls, is part of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project. Elster's EnergyAxis was selected to automate Smart Meter data collection for the commnunity’s electric customers, enabling faster demand response, improved load control, and voltage conservation. In addition, the utility's customers will benefit from flexible payment options and increased visibility into energy usage via an online portal in the near future.

Glasgow, Kentucky Electric Plant Board is one of the 155 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power distributors, a network of utilities providing electricity for nine million people across southeastern states. Glasgow EPB selected Elster EnergyAxis to achieve improved operational efficiencies and empower its customers to better manage energy usage and lower energy costs.

Silicon Valley Power (SVP) is the not-for-profit municipal electric utility for the City of Santa Clara, providing power to more than 52,000 residential and business customers.  Elster EnergyAxis is supplying the meters and the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to bring the environmental and economic benefits of the Smart Grid to businesses and residents of Santa Clara.

In the City of Ocala, Florida, the vision was to install new technology while leveraging existing technology infrastructure to enable measures to reduce operational expenditures, and enhance billable revenues, while improving customer service within both the electric and water utilities - with little to no disruption to the utility customer. The solution was EnergyAxis.

Elster Solutions services many electricity cooperatives in the United States. The Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) covers the largest geographical area of any electric cooperative in the world, with 54 member villages. To provide electrical power, AVEC has over 150 diesel generators that run more than 400,000 hours per year. Elster EnergyAxis provided the solution for connecting these villages with a reliable source of power.

Elster EnergyAxis Smart Grid solution will power an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system for Fort Collins Utilities' electric and water customers, delivering system and operational improvements and providing consumers with more flexibility in electric and water usage.

"The goal of the Advanced Meter Fort Collins project is to develop a foundation that supports, informs and empowers our community to make informed decisions about how they manage water and electricity consumption," said Steve Catanach, Light and Power Manager at City of Fort Collins Utilities.

Gas Natural Fenosa, a leading multi-national in the gas and power sectors selects Elster for Gas AMI project. The company operates in 23 countries and has more than 20 million customers around the world.

Merrimac Light and Water Department and Groveland Electric Light Department teamed up to save costs and effectively serve their customers with EnergyAxis despite limited resources and noncontiguous service territories. These utilities were losing meter reading resources due to retirement, and none wanted to increase workforce complement to handle meter reading duties. The towns entered into an agreement to act as one utility from Elster’s perspective. As a result, these utilities are saving significantly on costs associated with server hardware, licensing fees, project management services, and training.

DOMLEC selected EnergyAxis to improve power restoration and expand the benefits of the utility's popular prepayment program. With an average of 10 to12 hurricanes or tropical storms per season, DOMLEC trusts EnergyAxis AMI to make restoration of service more efficient. EnergyAxis’ outage management and restoration notification capabilities are used to target critical service connections, such as medical facilities, police stations and hurricane shelters. DOMLEC also expects EnergyAxis will add value to its very popular prepaid metering service. Some 20 percent of their customers have prepaid metering, and the service represents about 10 percent of the utility’s revenue.

Metrix in New Zealand, has performed extensive technology experiments and analysis to test the effectiveness of mesh networks in rural areas. Metrix studies different types of antennas, dBi gains, and mounting heights to determine the best application for communication to various meter densities and distances has proven that EnergyAxis can be deployed with confidence into rural and remote applications.

“We didn’t want to learn about AMI by reading about what other utilities were doing with the technology, so we began working with the Elster EnergyAxis solution in 2004. We saw such significant benefits to cost-savings and operations, we doubled our EnergyAxis deployment in 2010,” said Scott Trout, Manager of SRP’s Federal Stimulus Program.

Since deploying the Elster EnergyAxis Smart Grid solution, SRP has completed more than 1 million service orders remotely without field visits, saved more than 341,000 in labor hours, avoided more than 1.7 million driving miles, conserved 169,000 gallons of fuel and won J.D. Power and Associates highest score for customer satisfaction in 2011.

In 2006, Toronto Hydro-Electric announced that they would deploy 400,000 EnergyAxis electricity meters for the first phase of the Ontario Smart Meter Initiative, one of the largest AMI projects in the world using interval data for residential metering. "After testing the system for a year we concluded that the EnergyAxis System is suited for our interval data metering needs," says Blair Peberdy, Vice President of Marketing, Communications and Public Affairs at Toronto Hydro Corporation.

In 2009, Toronto Hydro had almost 600,000 EnergyAxis smart meters deployed and launched a successful web portal where consumers can go for information on their consumption and costs. The web portal is fed from information directly from the EnergyAxis System,enabling Toronto Hydro to build a successful conservation program.

In the southwest and across North America, utilities choose Elster C700 encoder water meters based on their interoperability with existing AMR/AMI systems. When choosing the Second Source vendor for water meters to be used with an existing system, utilities are choosing Elster for our integral mount options and our commitment to customer service and technical services support.

The Elster RDS, aimed initially at the European market, was presented for the first time at E-World 2011. RDS enables rapid deployment of a complete solution, from metering all the way through to meter data management. This scalable solution can allow deployment of a relatively small number of points, from one thousand to several hundred thousand. Utilities of different sizes can use Elster's new RDS to more quickly and efficiently plan and deploy cost-effective Smart Metering networks.

Scottish and Southern Energy Supply Limited (SSE) chooses Elsters AS300 Smart Meter with customized dual fuel Smart Grid deployment for gas and electricity intelligent management. "Elster is providing us with flexible, smart, gas and electricity meters as we begin the roll-out of an integrated solution that starts to deliver the benefits of Smart Metering to our customers," said Andrew Monks, smart metering programme manager for SSE.

Électricité Réseau Distribution France (ERDF), one of the largest electricity distribution networks in the EU, selected Elster to help it develop an interoperable and modular Smart Meter. The ERDF Linky Smart Meters are part of the utility’s Linky automated meter management (AMM) system. The meter is designed to provide advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) services that will enable ERDF customers to control electricity consumption, improve overall energy management and enable the utility to perform remote meter reads.

Elster's AMR system selected by large Russian gas utility, allowing them to remotely collect residential gas meter consumption information.

In April, 2011, Geraldo Guimaraes Jr. joined Elster Integrated Solutions (EIS) Latin America from Silver Spring Networks, to direct our integrated efforts to deliver Smart Metering and Smart Grid solutions which meet the specific needs of Latin American utilities across gas, electricity and water.

Light S.A. (Light), a private utility providing electricity to the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, selected Elster's intelligent Garnet units. The AMI system will help increase energy efficiency, conserve resources, empower consumers and enhance distribution to customers currently without electric service. The system will integrate with home area networks, providing customers with increased control and additional service options.

Electrica de Guayaquil (EDG), the largest electric utility in Ecuador, will rely on Elster’s EnergyAxis to accelerate its billing process, more quickly respond to customer requests and reduce commercial losses. The two-way AMI deployment enables EDG to remotely connect/disconnect service using Smart Meters, reduce its time-to-response to customer service
requests and gain real-time access to meter data to accelerate the billing process from 10 days down to one day.

Karagandy Zharyk, a regional distribution grid company supplying electricity to more than 1.5 million customers in central Kazakhstan, has chosen Elster to provide turn-key AMI deployment solutions for high and medium voltage substations. "We have seen exceptional results utilizing Elster's accurate and innovative solutions to better manage commercial and technical losses. Based on this success from our initial AMI deployment, we have selected Elster to further expand our AMI program to meet the requirements set by the governmental energy efficiency program," said Nurzhan Imanov, general manager of Karagandy Zharyk.