EAC and Echelon - How one smart meter deployment covered the largest country in the world.
By delivering high levels of reliability and an
open software platform, Echelon and EAC were able to develop customized applications that eliminated
unnecessary field visits and delivered real value and cost savings to Russian Railways.
Imagine all the challenges you face modernizing your electricity grid. Now, imagine the same task, but across the largest country in the world where temperatures can dip to -55 oC.
This was the challenge faced by Russian Railways. With their electrical grid stretching across the forest tundra in Siberia, mountain ranges in the south,
and rolling hills and plains in between, Russian Railways deployment promised to be one of the most challenging efforts to date.
Geography was the main obstacle Russian Rail- ways faced five years ago as they considered efforts to modernize their electricity grid. Russia, the
third largest energy producer in the world, covers more than one eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area (17 million km2), and is nearly twice the size of the United States. Extending across the whole of northern Asia and most of Eastern Europe, Russia spans nine time zones and incorporates a range of environments and landforms. It is the ninth most populous nation with 25% of its 143 million people still living in rural areas. Over the last five years, Russian Railways has installed nearly 250,000 Echelon smart meters across its sprawling network through their
systems integrator ENERGOAUDITCONTROL (EAC) to modernize the energy grid.
This case study investigates the deployment challenges faced and how they were solved in a joint solution delivered by
EAC and Echelon.
Never Visit the Meter Again
“Five years
ago, the key challenge EAC faced in their deployment for Russian Railways was
geography. It was the largest distance spanned for a smart meter deployment we’ve seen. The
new meters EAC installed had to work. They had to prove they could withstand
the test of time and that they could be remotely controlled with software to
eliminate field visits,” said Jeff
Lund, VP of Business
Development
at Echelon. “With the distance involved, it was simply too expensive to visit
meters. Instead, we had to demonstrate we had a solu- tion where EAC would almost never need to visit the meter
again.”
To meet the
challenge, the solution needed to meet three main requirements:
- Deliver
unquestioned reliability. The solution needed to provide a communications and
controls network that worked flawlessly in an extremely harsh environment. It
had to be performance driven and built for reliable data transport. Without
reliable communications, nothing else mattered, so this was by far the most
important proof point.
- Provide
vital grid health data with the ability to pinpoint problems. Because of the
distances involved in servicing the grid, EAC was looking for more than a
billing solution; they wanted a meter that could also provide grid sensing,
where information about grid health could be available through the meter.
- Be
completely software driven. The solution needed to provide upgrades and
reconfiguration changes through software. Remote service calls are expensive
and EAC wouldn’t always have the luxury of a field visit to update or change meters.
The only remedy would be to provide control of the meters through software
where changes could be made remotely. Features like remote connect/disconnect
and firmware upgrades were “must have” items.
After
evaluating many different smart metering solutions, Echelon was chosen to
partner with EAC and provide their energy control networking platform – the
Networked Energy Services (NES) smart metering solution for the deployment. “Technically,
given the large number of meters we anticipated operating in our system over
time and the vast distances covered by our project – literally
spanning the entire country – we required
a system that can both scale in size and over distance,” said
Sylvian Seu, EAC’s chief executive officer at the time
of
deployment in 2007. “The NES
system has the proven capability for both. From a business perspective we were
looking to implement a next generation set of features that goes far beyond
automated meter reading. And, we were looking to deploy the system and deliver
value
quickly. Because the NES system exposes its functionality to our IT staff as
industry standard web services, we could quickly and cost effectively integrate
and develop application and meet our aggressive deployment schedule.”