ELO Announces Echelon-Powered Cemig 'City of the Future' Pilot in Brazil

SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ: ELON), a global leader in energy control networking for the smart grid, today announced a 1,500 unit pilot in Brazil through its partner ELO at Cemig's City of the Future project in the Sete Lagoas region. Cemig is the largest power company in Brazil, serving over 7 million customers in 774 municipalities. Echelon is providing smart metering sub-systems to ELO, leveraging its proven Energy Control Networking Platform. With some of the highest non-technical loss rates in the world, and increased use of distributed generation, the Brazilian market needs a multi-application smart grid infrastructure such as the Echelon solution that encompasses more than just traditional metering.

Cemig's City of the Future project is designed to assess the capability and benefits of the adoption of a Smart Grid for future deployment. Its primary goals are to motivate customer engagement through meter installation, workshops, and monitoring and to validate new services, assess benefits, and improve operational efficiency for advanced metering infrastructure and distribution automation. The Sete Lagoas region includes 95,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers. Sete Lagoas was chosen because it includes a range of old and new infrastructure within high, medium and low voltage, telecommunications systems, offering a heterogeneous network, economic profile, and range of applications.

"With strong fundamental economic drivers, the Brazilian market represents a large and attractive opportunity and we're pleased to show successful trials through our partner ELO," said Ron Sege, chairman and CEO of Echelon. "We are successfully targeting growing markets, applying our power line communication and Control Operating System (COS) software and laying the groundwork for a multi-application edge-of-the-grid solution with high profile local partners such as ELO."

This past August, Brazil's National Agency of Electrical Energy, ANEEL, announced long awaited regulations regarding the deployment of smart meters throughout Brazil. These new regulations require all new meter installations to be smart meters by early 2014, but they do not require the replacement of existing legacy meters. While this reduces the overall Brazil market size from previous estimates by approximately 25% to $28 billion per Northeast Research, it clarifies the process and provides a timeline and specifications so that utilities have a path for investment. With non-technical losses in Brazil estimated between 10-30%, smart meter deployments can yield immediate savings and leverage other smart grid applications such as renewables and home energy management.

"The Brazilian market is very large and it is now prepared to make the bold steps toward modernization and creating a truly smart grid," said Marcos Rizzo, vice president of Business Development of ELO. "We believe that basing our smart meter on the industry standard Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP) and our system solution on Echelon technology enables us to uniquely deliver improved quality of service, reduce peak demand and operational costs, and protect revenue for our customers."

About Echelon Corporation
Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ: ELON) is an energy control networking company, with the world's most widely deployed proven, open standard, multi-application platform, selling complete systems and embedded sub-systems for smart grid, smart city and smart building applications. Our platform is embedded in more than 100 million devices, 35 million homes, and 300,000 buildings and powers energy savings applications for smart grids, smart cities and smart buildings. We help our customers reduce operational costs, enhance satisfaction and safety, grow revenues and prepare for a dynamic future. More information about Echelon can be found at http://www.echelon.com.

Visit the Smart Energy Blog by Echelon.

About Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP)
The Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP) is a family of specifications published by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) used in conjunction with the ISO/IEC 14908 control networking standard for smart grid applications. OSGP is optimized to provide reliable and efficient delivery of command and control information for smart meters, direct load control modules, solar panels, gateways, and other smart grid devices. With over 3.5 million OSGP based smart meters and devices deployed worldwide it is a widely used smart meter and smart grid device networking standard. More information about OSGP can be found at www.opensmartgridprotocol.org. 

Echelon and the Echelon logo are registered trademarks of Echelon Corporation registered in the United States and other countries. Other product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

This press release may contain statements relating to future plans, events or performance. Such statements may involve risks and uncertainties, including risks associated with Brazilian market acceptance of Echelon's technology by itself or combined with other applications or offerings, including offerings by ELO; the risk that Echelon's offerings by themselves or combined with other applications or offerings do not perform as designed or do not offer the expected benefits and savings; risks associated with international sales; the timing of orders and the possibility that pilot orders may not expand into full deployments; and other risks identified in Echelon's SEC filings. Actual results, events and performance may differ materially. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. Echelon undertakes no obligation to release publicly the result of any revisions to these forward-looking statements that may be made to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

Contact:
Colleen Martell
+1 (408) 832-0147
[email protected]

SOURCE Echelon Corporation