Landis+Gyr is announcing the addition of four-relay and two-relay load control switches to its North American load management product portfolio. This new generation of switches allows the control of multiple appliances from a single installation to support more effective utility demand response and variable rate programs.
Load control switches are a key component of most successful demand response programs, and single-relay switches have seen broad adoption, especially in rural electric cooperatives. With the number of controllable loads in modern homes increasing, management of peak demand now requires multi-relay switches that can access multiple loads at a single premise.
Landis+Gyr’s new multi-relay load control switches can be linked to air conditioning, water heating, pool pumps, electric heating, and other high-use residential loads, and report the amount of load available for control at each appliance. Additionally, Landis+Gyr’s load control switches offer verification of operation, under-voltage and under-frequency protection, and the ability to update firmware over the AMI network.
“The flexibility of a multi-relay switch is what makes it a key component for today’s residential demand response programs,” said Andy Marshall, Practice Director for Distributed Energy Resource Management at Landis+Gyr. “One switch can be used to control nearly all high-use home appliances and when combined with edge applications, like Demand Manager, this switch can improve the effectiveness of demand response and time-varying rate programs to drive down peak power costs.”
As part of Landis+Gyr’s comprehensive load management solution, the new load control switches interact with Power Center, Landis+Gyr’s North American load management operating system, to balance system capacity and provide measurable and verifiable data for managing demand response events. Power Center offers a multi-tenancy feature allowing generation and transmission cooperatives to share access to the software with multiple utilities.
More information is available at www.landisgyr.com.