NES solutions provide increased energy efficiency and flexibility for the Swiss Market

San Jose, CA, October 13, 2020: Networked Energy Services Corporation (NES), a global smart grid solution provider with the industry’s leading Energy Applications Platform (EAP^TM), is pleased to announce the deployment of its integrated HW and SW solution for dual relay control for business and residential consumers.

The NES solution allows DSOs to integrate the normally separate meter and relay control capabilities into the meter, and integrates them for local, scheduled and remote control through its innovative software solutions. As part of this innovation, highly reliable and secure OSGP communication is used to integrate the control of the relays with the standard metering control and information over the PLC network. This is made possible by the high communication SLAs, typically over 99.7%, which are a feature of NES’s implementation of OSGP.

The dual relays can be controlled from the meter optical interface (for installation and local control in special conditions), by schedules which can be loaded remotely from the Head-end System and run independently on the meter, or by remote commands sent from the SCADA platform. Monitoring of the service is provided by a “heart-beat” function which implements a fallback to local control if the control via remote communication fails.

This solution can replace legacy Ripple Control systems, used to assist in grid loading and re-start operations and can also control demand by restricting supply to heavy-load drawing applications at the consumer premise.

Combining the features of metering and relay control within one physical unit and one communication connection reduces the time and cost of deployment and greatly simplifies the operation of the system.

This solution has been co-developed with VIVAVIS but is available through NES to other customers.

“This is an exciting new development for NES and VIVAVIS,” said David Thomson, NES President & CEO. “Our solution confirms NES’s role as a vendor that is leading improvements in energy efficiency and availability. Although driven by requirements from the Swiss market, we can see this solution having applications in many markets where relays are used in meters to control demand in order to achieve reliability in the service and maintain optimal performance of infrastructure.”

“This solution is perfect for the Swiss market” said Ingo Schmitt, VIVAVIS responsible for metering business, “The cost effectiveness of having two functions consolidated into one platform, the re-use of existing secure and reliable OSGP communication and the various modes of local, scheduled and remote operation, mean that DSOs can achieve ripple control and demand response more effectively.”

About Networked Energy Services Corporation (NES)
Networked Energy Services Corporation is a global smart energy leader in the worldwide transformation of the electricity grid into an energy control network, enabling utilities to provide their customers with a more efficient and reliable service, to protect their systems from current and emerging cybersecurity threats, and to offer innovative new services that enable active, intelligent use of energy. NES was formed as a result of the spinoff of Echelon Corporation’s Grid Modernization Division in October 2014. NES is headquartered in the US with R&D centers located in Silicon Valley and Poland, and sales offices throughout the world. NES’s smart grid technology is used in nearly 40 million smart meters and other smart end devices around the world. NES is a member of the OSGP Alliance, a global association of utilities and smart grid companies, which promotes the Open Smart Grid Protocol and cooperates to provide utilities greater value by enabling true, independently-certified, multi-vendor interoperability based upon open international specifications and standards.  You can find out more information about NES, its Patagonia Energy Applications Platform^TM (including grid management software, distributed control nodes, and smart meters) and services at: www.networkedenergy.com.

About VIVAVIS and its subsidiaries share a passion for solutions that are able to share, qualify, monitor, control, process and communicate any type of data across different areas and functions: from asset data to geo-referenced, security-critical data through to measured values from metering, submetering or IoT infrastructures. Our solutions provide benefits for a variety of sectors – from utility companies to industry and commerce, as well as municipal utilities and the housing industry - both nationally and internationally.
Additional information is available at: www.vivavis.ch