Echelon Corp. (ELON) and Kapsch Announce Achievement of Major Milestone in Austria with Smart Meter Deployment at Stadwerke Feldkirch

Echelon, a leader in energy control networking for smart grid, smart city, and smart building applications worldwide, and Kapsch Smart Energy, a subsidiary of the $1.2B revenue per year Kapsch Group, which delivers smart energy management solutions, announced that they are currently operating 13,000 of Echelon’s smart meters at Stadwerke Feldkirch, the municipal utility for the city of Feldkirch. The advanced meters are part of the Echelon Energy Control Networking Platform. Kapsch and Echelon anticipate targeting other utilities in Austria and Central Europe to deliver the benefits of a multi-application grid modernization platform. Both companies expect this market to grow to nearly five million in size within the next few years.

“We are excited to partner with Kapsch on this opportunity and proud to supply Feldkirch with proven, reliable and feature rich smart meters, and we applaud their leadership position in modernizing the grid,” said Michael Anderson, senior vice president, Worldwide Markets, at Echelon. “Echelon’s smart metering solution satisfies both existing regulatory and business demands, but it also provides customers insight so they can better manage their energy usage and offer a path to meet future requirements and programs in the Austrian market.”

Feldkirch was the first city in Austria to integrate smart metering into its utilities, as well as adopt the network infrastructure, the central control and analysis system, and the energy consumption information for the end customer portal. In this portal, households and businesses can minimize their power use by observing their individual power consumption. These solutions also provide new opportunities for energy suppliers, to optimize their pricing models for example.

“I was pleasantly surprised that integrating the meters was practically plug-and-play from our perspective. Thanks to the mature solution, the system optimally fulfills our smart metering requirements,” says Karlheinz Kresser, project director at Stadtwerke Feldkirch.

Feldkirch mandated the highest security standards of Kapsch and Echelon to satisfy all statutory and data privacy requirements of the Austrian smart meter ordinances. Echelon’s smart meters use the existing electricity networks for transmitting data to the nearest network node. Every step of the communication is dynamically encrypted at 128 bits. This is the same level of security employed as other security intensive applications such as online banking. Corresponding authentication mechanisms for the meters and in the end customer portal are designed to prevent unauthorized access.

“The concepts of smart metering and smart grids are still relatively young. From the beginning, Kapsch has focused not only on the technical aspects but also on the legal and organizational factors. With international partners like Echelon, we also bring experiences from other countries into smart energy projects. With its multi-application platform based on open standards, Echelon has the best-established solution in the world,” says Christian Schober, CEO of Kapsch Smart Energy. “This partnership further secures our lead in this market segment. The strengths of Kapsch Smart Energy and Echelon complement each other optimally,” says Schober.

For more information, please visit www.echelon.com and www.kapschsmartenergy.com

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