Aclara eTWACS Solution Innovates to Exceed Customer Expectations for Power Line Data

New Head End Software Released on Completion of Successful Beta Program

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Jul 31, 2014, 01:53 ET

ST. LOUIS, July 31, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- With the announcement today of a new head end software solution (TNS 2.9), the enhanced TWACS (eTWACS™) power-line communications technology from Aclara Technologies LLC, a leading supplier of smart infrastructure technologies to gas, water, and electric utilities, delivers on customer demands.

The Aclara® power-line technology retrieves hourly data from more than 13.5 million meters at more than 360 electric utilities with a read rate higher than 99 percent. The new head end software takes full advantage of the benefits provided by eTWACS, which reads all three phases and all feeders on each substation bus in parallel. The eTWACS solution adds significant capacity for future power line communications, allowing electric utilities to effectively handle smart grid applications, such as outage management, load control, and distribution management using power line communications.

"The greatest benefit of eTWACS is the rapid processing of various reads and retries," said Don Flanders, AMI administrator at Rio Grande Electric Cooperative, Brackettville, Texas. "This allows the system to handle pings from PROASYS (Aclara's software for determining meter outages) sooner, which helps our outage management system locate outages during and after a storm." Rio Grande has 13,000 meters deployed across 37,000 square miles.

In addition to providing greater capacity for transmitting and receiving data, the two-way functionality of eTWACS provides on-request reads, control of load-shed events, remote connect and disconnect of meters, and the downloading of features like firmware updates. The eTWACS solution is fully backward compatible with previous Aclara technologies, ensuring all endpoints co-exist with eTWACS-enabled meters.

About Aclara
Aclara Technologies LLC is a world-class supplier of smart infrastructure technologies to water, gas, and electric utilities globally. Over 500 utilities in nine countries rely on proven Aclara solutions to connect with their customers. Aclara Technologies LLC is owned by Sun Capital Partners. Create Your Intelligent Infrastructure™ www.Aclara.com. Follow us on Twitter @AclaraSolutions.

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SOURCE Aclara Technologies LLC