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San Jose, CA and New Delhi, India, July 10, 2008 -- Echelon Corp. announced that HCL Infosystems Ltd. has become the first value-added reseller of Echelon's Networked Energy Services (NES) advanced metering system in India. HCL Infosystems is an information and communication technologies system integrator, specializing in infrastructure projects including power and utility systems.
With an estimated 56 percent of rural households and 12 percent of urban households still without adequate access to electricity and peak power shortage of around 15 percent, availability of power is viewed as critically linked to the ability of India's economy to maintain its current nine percent annual growth rate.
India's power ministry plans to provide electricity to every household by 2012 at an investment of over $100 billion in new generation, transmission, distribution and rural electric infrastructure. To achieve this goal, electricity generation and distribution capacity will need to be increased by an amount greater than what has been available in India for the last fifty years. India's top analysts are predicting that power deficits could cap the country's growth in coming years.
Advanced metering infrastructures like Echelon's NES System are designed to make the energy grid more efficient by enabling utilities to implement direct load control and demand/response programs, limit maximum energy consumption during times of peak demand and detect and reduce meter tampering and energy theft. HCL plans to market the solution to utilities looking to improve power delivery while reducing operation costs, and to provide revenue recovery and protection.
The NES advanced metering infrastructure from Echelon consists of a family of electronic electricity meters accessed via a web services based network operating system over an IP networking infrastructure. The system provides an open, bidirectional, and extensible infrastructure that is designed to enable a range of utility applications that can bring benefits to the utility. Unlike systems with a dedicated radio per metering point, multiple NES meters can share a single IP connection through the use of Echelon's proven standards-based power line networking technology, driving down the per-point connection cost and enabling the system to easily and cost-effectively incorporate new wide area networking technologies over time.
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