Echelon Corp. has announced a 1,500-unit pilot in Brazil through its partner ELO for Cemig's City of the Future smart grid pilot in the Sete Lagoas region. Cemig serves over 7 million customers in 774 municipalities across Brazil.
For the pilot, Echelon is providing smart metering sub-systems to ELO, an electronic metering company. The 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.
In August, Brazil's National Agency of Electrical Energy announced regulations regarding the deployment of smart meters throughout Brazil, notes Echelon. These regulations require all new meter installations to be smart meters by early 2014, but they do not require the replacement of existing legacy meters.
