Smart Grid Specialist Echelon To Partners: We Need You

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Echelon took the wraps off two new product lines Wednesday, both of which will help meet the smart grid needs of tomorrow through more intelligent management of how electricity is produced, consumed and distributed, the smart grid specialist said.

Echelon sells metering devices and other energy infrastructure and utility technologies, in part through the channel. Its executives see a need for creating a partner ecosystem that will be responsible for everything from software development on Echelon's platform to meeting services and business intelligence opportunities that the so-called smart grid infrastructure requires.

Ron Sege, formerly of 3Com and Echelon's recently-appointed president and CEO, said Wednesday that smarter energy technologies are about collecting information and processing information to make decisions "as close to the end device as possible."

Many current energy market technologies -- which often measure and manage energy usage but don't necessarily troubleshoot problems -- will be insufficient for the future, Echelon argues. It's not enough for smart grid technologies to merely identify problems, Sege explained, especially with microgrid power systems and energy-sappers like electric cars becoming more common and putting more strain on energy resources.

"In the smart grid, latency counts and reliability counts, so distributing intelligence -- or what we call intelligent distribution control -- will be critical to this next phase of the smart grid build-out," said Sege, speaking at an Echelon conference in New York Wednesday. "That's what Echelon does."

Sege cited a number of industry statistics about energy consumption, including that outages have increased by 124 percent in the U.S. over the last two decades, and that developing countries, which accounted for 27 percent of the global electricity demand in 2000, will account for 43 percent by 2030.

According to the Department of Energy, Sege said, electrical outrages cost U.S. consumers $150 billion a year.

Among the new releases from Echelon are the Echelon Control System (ECoS), an open software platform intended for use in intelligent distributed control of the smart grid, and a family of hardware products called the Edge Control Node (ECN) 7000 series that works with wireless transceivers and antennas, and also provides connectivity to various power line networked devices and consumer and commercial utility devices.

The ECN devices, using the ECoS platform, in theory extend intelligent control features such as the ability to monitor line signal strength out to the edge of the grid. That will result in an even "smarter" energy infrastructure that will make for better redundancy and security, cleaner and more efficient energy use, more reliable quality-of-service and fewer electrical problems overall, not to mention lowered op-ex and cap-ex for utility companies, Sege explained.

Next: How The Channel Fits In

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