Echelon Corp. has been selected for the project Smart Grid Gotland. This project is a large-scale, pioneering smart grid technology demonstration on the island of Gotland, Sweden. It is a joint venture between Vattenfall, Gotland Energy, ABB, Swedish National Grid, Schneider Electric, Royal Institute of Technology and partly financed by the Swedish Energy Agency.
Echelon will provide its Edge Control Node, its Control Operating System (COS)-based application platform and 3000 advanced grid sensors, which also provide smart metering functionality. The first applications to use Echelon's solutions include smart metering, power quality monitoring and analysis, transformer monitoring, outage detection, load management, and related analytics applications using NES system software.
The project will demonstrate how new smart grid technologies can improve the electrical quality of large rural grids by using large quantities of distributed power generation and advanced load management strategies. Echelon was selected based upon its smart meter technology, which will increase overall grid quality, efficiency and reliability, as well as integration and management of renewable energy sources. The Smart Grid Gotland project began in the fall of 2012 and will run until 2015.
As part of the project, Echelon smart meters provide hourly meter reading; two-way communication for surveillance of the low voltage grid for power quality and power outage data; substation monitoring; measurement of energy fed into the grid; interface to a distribution management system/supervisory control and data acquisition (DMS/SCADA) system; interface to a customer web-portal; and interface to a home area network (HAN).
