Ecuador's Electrica de Guayaquil Selects Elster for Two-Way AMI Smart Grid Deployment

RALEIGH, N.C., Sept. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Elster announced today that Electrica de Guayaquil (EDG), the largest electric utility in Ecuador, has selected the Elster EnergyAxis® Smart Grid solution for one of South America's first two-way advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployments.

EDG will rely on Elster's EnergyAxis® to accelerate its billing process, more quickly respond to customer requests and reduce commercial losses.

EDG provides electric power services to more than 550,000 residents across Ecuador. For the initial phase of its Smart Grid project, the utility will deploy the Elster EnergyAxis® solution to more than 4,500 residential, commercial and industrial locations to enable remote meter reads, and will deploy more than 250 low voltage AGI nodes for load balance.

The two-way AMI deployment enables EDG to remotely connect/disconnect service using Smart Meters, reduce its time-to-response to customer service requests and gain real-time access to meter data to accelerate the billing process from 10 days down to one day.

"With its proven track record, including more than 80 AMI deployments across the globe, Elster EnergyAxis® was the clear choice," said Diego Sanchez, commercial manager, EDG.

"EDG is dedicated to improving energy efficiency and providing our customers with timely responses to all of their energy needs. Elster EnergyAxis® will be integrated across our existing IT infrastructure to enable enhanced customer services and near immediate identification of commercial losses," Sanchez added.  

The Elster EnergyAxis® Smart Grid solution will be integrated with EDG's existing commercial applications, including the utility's geographic information system, to provide future Smart Grid benefits such as outage management and the ability to more efficiently deploy maintenance crews. EDG's Smart Grid AMI deployment relies on Elster's EnergyAxis® for radio communications technology that enables bi-directional mesh communication with each Smart Meter, helping to reduce operating costs.  

"As an industry leader, Electrica de Guayaquil is showing great initiative in implementing one of South America's first Smart Grid projects involving two-way communications," said Mark Munday, president and CEO of Elster Solutions.

"Every Elster utility customer has unique technical requirements, but nearly identical goals—to improve energy efficiency and customer service. EnergyAxis® is specifically designed to meet the business needs of utilities with customized Smart Grid technology solutions," Munday added.

EnergyAxis®, a field-proven Smart Grid solution with more than 4.5 million endpoints deployed with utilities across North America, enables utilities to:

• Realize operational efficiencies;
• Conserve environmental and economic resources by reducing the losses in electricity, gas and water grids;
• Reduce outages, and improve outage response and repair time;
• Improve customer service and consumer choice;
• Implement demand response programs that can conserve resources and reduce costs, especially during periods of peak demand;
• Provide real-time information to end consumers to allow them to better manage their energy consumption; and
• Detect and reduce non-technical losses.

About Elster

Elster is one of the world's largest electricity, gas and water measurement and control providers. Our offerings include distribution monitoring and control, advanced smart metering, demand response, networking and software solutions, and numerous related communications and services – key components for enabling consumer choice, operational efficiency and conservation. Our products and solutions are widely used by utilities in the traditional and emerging Smart Grid markets.  

Elster has one of the most extensive installed revenue measurement bases in the world, with more than 200 million metering devices deployed over the course of the last 10 years. It sells its products and services in more than 130 countries across electricity, gas, water and multi-utility applications for residential, commercial and industrial, and transmission and distribution applications.

Elster was acquired by funds advised by CVC Capital Partners in September 2005.

For more information about Elster, please visit www.elster.com.

SOURCE Elster

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