Echelon and Holley Metering to Offer Advanced Smart Grid Solutions To China Market

Echelon Corporation, today as announced a commercial agreement under which the two companies will initially collaborate to develop advanced smart metering products that meet the stringent requirements for the vast China market set by the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) and China Southern Power Grid Co., Ltd. (CSG).

The partnership will leverage Echelon's 20 years of experience in energy control networking systems, including highly reliable power line control and communications hardware and software components for smart grid applications, and Holley Metering's breadth of metering solutions and extensive customer relationships.

"We are delighted to join in partnership with Holley Metering to serve the vast smart grid market in China. With a mandate to connect 300 million homes and businesses to the smart grid over the next 5 years, Chinese utilities will need to leverage the best the world has to offer," said Ron Sege, President and CEO of Echelon. "Our partnership will create a unique energy control networking platform, based on the best technologies and years of real-world experiences, to deliver unsurpassed reliability, performance, capabilities and value to the market."

"We are extremely excited to utilize Echelon's field-proven technologies and leverage their extensive experience gained by connecting more than 35 million homes to the smart grid," said Jeffrey Guo, President of Holley Metering. "Utilities inside China and throughout the world are developing unique perspective and capabilities for the smart grid and for energy management, and our partnership can bring these in one package to our all our customers."

In China, utilities generally prefer to use the low voltage power line for "last mile" smart grid communication and control to maximize reliability, provide broadest capabilities and minimize deployment costs. Together, Holley Metering and Echelon will design Echelon's field-proven power line smart transceivers into meter communications modules and adapt Echelon's Control Operating System (COS) and control modules to the unique standards of the China marketplace.

This will provide Chinese utilities with the world's most reliable communications system and a broad range of advanced features including adapting meshing and automatic topology management. The end result is utilities will be able to offer a richer set of services to their customers and extract more value from the grid.

Over the coming months, the companies will develop and certify the advanced smart metering products created under this agreement in China, with plans to secure pilots with current Holley Metering customers in early 2012.