Our Utility ExperienceOver the past five years, Echelon has worked closely with Enel SpA of Italy (NYSE: EN; Milan: ENEL) on the world’s largest remote meter reading and networked metering system deployment. During this time, we've also implemented advanced metering trials with utilities such as Nuon in the Netherlands, NGC in New Zealand, and Sydkraft in Sweden. In June 2000, we entered into a research and development agreement with Enel, the world’s largest publicly traded utility, under which we integrated our LonWorks technology into Enel's remote metering project in Italy. In this project, Enel is replacing 27 million legacy electricity meters throughout its service territory with communicating solid-state meters. It's the largest meter replacement and upgrade project ever undertaken to date; deployment began in 2001 and is projected to complete in 2005. As of July 2005, Enel has successfully deployed approximately 25 million LonWorks powered smart electricity meters and over 250,000 Echelon data concentrators. Our Networked Energy Services (NES) system builds upon our experience in the utility industry and provides utilities with an extremely cost-effective system that can be deployed quickly to deliver both immediate and long-term cost-savings and operational improvements. To generate NES, we carefully assembled a dedicated, multi-national team of some of the world’s finest metering professionals, with hundreds of years of combined experience and over 45 million meters shipped based on their designs—including the meters deployed by Enel. Design and development work is centered at Echelon’s Silicon Valley headquarters in San Jose, Calif., where, in state-of-the-art meter manufacturing, testing, and production facilities our innovative, high-performance products are built to exacting standards. All NES-related design, development, and production facilities and processes are certified to stringent ISO 9001:2000 standards.
|
||
 |