Elster Answers Northern California Municipal Utilities' Need for Advanced Metering Solutions

RALEIGH, N.C., Dec. 20, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Elster Solutions today announced two members of the California Municipal Utilities Association, City of Palo Alto Utilities and City of Santa Clara's Silicon Valley Power (SVP), have selected and implemented advanced metering solutions featuring Elster's EnergyAxis® system. EnergyAxis is an award-winning AMI solution that provides two-way communication for electricity, water and natural gas meters.

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City of Palo Alto Utilities, a multi-utility serving nearly 29,000 customers, selected Elster as its partner for its Residential Customer Connect Pilot. The project is slated to begin in 2013 and expected to be completed in 2015. Elster, together with its partner Utilismart Corporation, a meter data management company, will utilize cloud computing to provide a fully managed and customized engagement program for 300 pilot customers through web portals and mobile applications.

"Elster's solutions will provide us with the technology and tools that will enable our 300 pilot customers to receive more relevant utility usage information and will help them make better decisions in consuming utility service," said Valerie Fong, Director of City of Palo Alto Utilities. "Through this project, we expect to learn how we could utilize this technology to improve services to our electricity, natural gas, and water services customers over the next couple of years."

Another Bay Area municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power, selected Elster's EnergyAxis system and Tropos Networks' Gridcom WAN solution for the implementation of its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to cover 51,000 electric and 27,000 water meters and leverage the system for both Smart Grid and Smart City applications going forward. Silicon Valley Power is the municipal electric utility for the City of Santa Clara.

"Serving a veritable who's who of the high tech industry in a state that is on the forefront of industry trends, we needed a proven and reliable partner for the deployment of an advanced metering and secure communications infrastructure," said Larry Owens, Customer Services Manager for SVP. "Elster and its EnergyAxis solution bring a turnkey solution with a powerful combination of capabilities for SVP and our customers' needs."

Security is a significant consideration for these California utilities. Elster delivers comprehensive end-to-end smart grid security to ensure confidentiality, integrity, availability, and auditability throughout every utility's network.

"With deployments throughout California, across the United States and around the world, Elster answers the demand municipal multi-utilities have for secure, cost-effective, end-to-end advanced metering products and services," said Ed Myszka, President, Elster Solutions. "We know that, despite compressed budgets, municipal utilities need to deploy innovative metering solutions, complete with comprehensive, actionable data and information to help them better serve their customers. Elster Solutions is packaged in such a way that allows all of our customers to deploy our products and services that fit their needs now and in the future."

Elster is the exclusive smart metering partner for Hometown Connections, the Utility Services subsidiary to the American Public Power Association (APPA). Hometown Connections offers APPA members advice and access to quality products/services from a trusted entity with public power's best interests in mind.

About Elster

With more 170 years of experience, Elster Solutions has built a reputation on providing cutting-edge technologies to deliver world class products, systems and services to utility clients worldwide. Elster Solutions has two main areas of business - electricity metering products and Smart Metering and Smart Grid system solutions. Elster Solutions engineers fully interoperable smart electricity metering products through custom-made options for utility customers and award-winning end-to-end solutions for the Smart Grid with EnergyAxis, a multi-utility advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system for water, gas and electricity around the world.

Elster Solutions helps utilities improve their revenue cycle services, customer service, delivery reliability, and enable efficient energy usage by utility consumers through demand response and in home networking capabilities.

For more information about Elster Solutions, please visit www.elster.com and follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/EnergyAxis.

SOURCE Elster