The Enel Project

One of the biggest utilities in the world, Enel SpA of Italy, is using Echelon’s hardware and software to deliver many of these benefits to its customer base of more than 27 million homes and buildings. In the biggest project of its kind, Enel is using Echelon’s LonWorks platform to transform the Italian power grid into an intelligent services delivery network that will connect to more than 27 million Italian homes and buildings when its deployment is complete.

In its regulated business, the initial set of services enabled by the system is projected by Enel to be deployed at such a low per-home cost that the system will pay for its entire infrastructure and installation cost in four years. These services include: automatic meter reading, demand side management, remote connection and disconnection of meters and may also include time-of-day pricing, outage detection and isolation, theft detection, load balancing, and load shifting. The cost and efficiency gains of this system ensure its success.

Additionally, the system provides a platform for Enel to offer its customers additional unregulated services, such as remote diagnostics and control of appliances, security monitoring, and medical emergency signaling. These services can share the same infrastructure as the regulated services, enabling them to be deployed at very little incremental cost. In effect, these additional services represent almost pure "upside" revenue. And, because Echelon supports multiple wide-area connection utilities in the same system (power line, telephone, and broadband), Enel can add bandwidth as needed to support future services while preserving its investment in back-end systems and its customers investment in smart devices.

At Glance:

For more information, please visit www.echelon.com