(Source: Business Wire)
Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ:ELON)
and Onzo Ltd., the creator of award-winning smart customer solutions for
utilities, today announced a collaboration to develop consumer displays
for Echelon's Networked Energy Services (NES) System, a leading advanced
metering infrastructure solution. Onzo has signed an agreement to become
a value-added developer for the NES System. The U.K. plans to require
all households to have smart meters by 2020.
Planned collaboration will build on Onzo's expertise in developing
in-home displays, intelligent energy analysis software and consumer
orientated web portals. This will enable consumers to monitor energy
consumption in real time, facilitating energy-use behavior change to
benefit both the consumer and utility.
Echelon recently announced new products and a series of enhancements to
its NES System. The newest generation of Echelon's smart meters includes
a Multipurpose Expansion Port (MEP) interface that can enable companies
like Onzo to develop extensions to the NES System, making the grid
smarter and helping create a dialogue between the consumer and the grid.
Joel Hagan, CEO of Onzo, said, "This development agreement will enable
Onzo to provide utilities that choose Echelon's NES System with
solutions that match today's sophisticated consumer demands, allowing
them to offer friendly yet powerful interfaces for energy monitoring and
management. Echelon provides a unique architecture based on open
standards which enables the extension of basic AMR functionality to a
rich application portfolio and offers capabilities to go beyond the
meter."
"Engaging with the consumer is a key challenge for utilities. We are
excited to be working with Onzo and believe that the combination of
Onzo's consumer interfaces and Echelon's NES System will be able to
offer new services to consumers, utilities and laterally to their
distribution networks, said Mark Ossel, Echelon's vice president of
Energy & Utility. "Onzo demonstrates the advantages of an open
architecture with the addition of innovative applications on the
head-end and end-user devices beyond the meter."
About Echelon's NES System
The NES advanced metering infrastructure consists of a family of highly
integrated, advanced electronic electricity meters accessed via a Web
services based network operating system over an IP networking
infrastructure.
