GreenBeat

Landis+Gyr, one of the biggest smart meter makers in the business, partnered with Texan energy transmission provider Oncor to quickly deploy 300,000 new advanced meters in the Dallas Metro area — setting new standards for how big and fast other Smart Grid vendors should be thinking. Despite much hand wringing and heehawing in the sector about how long it takes to switch out traditional meters with their slick new cousins, Oncor says the team will have 700,000 meters in place by the end of 2009.

By 2012, the figure should jump to 3 million meters — Oncor’s full coverage area of residences and small businesses. As it stands, Landis+Gyr’s meters, will channel energy consumption data every 15 minutes to local utilities and to consumers via their home energy management dashboards. Ultimately, the hope is to equip utility customers with the usage and pricing information they need to adopt conservationist practices and save money on their energy bills.

The full Landis+Gyr package, including the metering equipment, wireless network infrastucture and ome energy management tools, is called Gridstream. The company says the system can save users up to 15 percent on energy costs by reducing their energy use by up to 10 percent.

With Smart Grid deployments rolling out all over the country, via Duke Energy in several southern states and PG&E in Northern California, among many others, this project sticks out because it is one of the largest and fastest executions of Smart Grid retrofitting to date. This places them in a position of national leadership. It also gives a nice boost to Landis+Gyr, which hasn’t been as active recently as its competitors Itron, Echelon and Elster — all of which have forged partnerships with major utilities for large roll outs or home energy monitoring companies to integrate consumer-facing technology into their systems.

Its recent decision to join a Cisco Systems consortium of Smart Grid players agreeing to work off the same set of standards, should also help raise its profile. Big names like Accenture, Oracle, Verizon, Trilliant, Tendril, Florida Power and Light and Duke Energy are involved with the group.

VentureBeat is hosting GreenBeat, the seminal executive conference on the Smart Grid, on Nov. 18-19, featuring keynotes from Nobel Prize winner Al Gore and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr. Register and see a preliminary agenda at GreenBeat2009.com.

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