Oracle Utilities and Echelon to Deliver Easy-to-Deploy Smart Grid Intelligence
Integrated solution helps utilities reduce outages, protect revenue and pay back grid investments
Oracle Utilities and Echelon announced they have teamed together to help utilities better
manage outages, protect revenue, offer demand response, and offer
prepayment options. The Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway integrated
with Echelon's proven smart metering solution allows utilities to
quickly and reliably deploy multiple applications to manage their assets
and customers.
"European
Union member states are required to have 80 percent of consumers
equipped with a smart meter by 2020," said Bastian Fischer, vice
president industry strategy, EMEA, Oracle Utilities. "Utilities need to
act now even though regulations, standards and available technology will
change, so they are looking for an open, multi-application solution
that will grow with them over time. Oracle and Echelon are pleased to
offer a highly flexible solution that is adaptable to changing customer,
operations and regulatory needs."
With
an increasing number of outages and growing demand for energy and
renewable integration, utilities need to manage new dynamics at the edge
of the grid. Real-time consumption and generation information is needed
to quickly diagnose and respond to problems and control devices.
Flexibility is needed to deploy new customer offerings such as
prepayment plans. In the combined solution, Echelon control nodes (data
concentrators or Edge Control Nodes) running the COS Operating System
aggregate data from Echelon meters or other smart devices deployed on
the low-voltage grid. Echelon head-end based system software
intelligently aggregates and pre-processes the data from these control
nodes, where they are passed to the Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway.
The Smart Grid Gateway then presents this data in a unified fashion to
Oracle's suite of applications. The result is a quick, easy and reliable
deployment for utilities.
"Utilities
need the ability to collect data from the field to diagnose problems
faster and the ability to turn that data into actionable, distributed
intelligence," said Michael Anderson, senior vice president for utility
sales and market development at Echelon. "The Echelon/Oracle solution
addresses this by combining two best-of-breed solutions to help
utilities better manage outages and protect revenue."