Cooper Power Systems, a division of Cooper Industries, Ltd. (NYSE: CBE), announced today that Cowlitz County Public Utility District (Cowlitz PUD) will fully implement the Cannon power line carrier (PLC) advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solution. Once complete Cowlitz PUD, Longview, Washington, will have deployed nearly 48,000 meters and will become the first large-scale deployment of the Cannon AMI solution in Washington state.
Cowlitz plans to integrate the Yukon(R) Advanced Energy Services Platform with customer information, outage management and geographic information systems utilizing the Microsoft(R) BizTalk server.
"We plan to start with the basics and as we increase our knowledge of the system, increase the functionality we utilize," said Brian Skeahan, general manager of Cowlitz PUD. "We look forward to providing our customers the ability to monitor their electrical usage online and set their monthly billing date."

In addition to Cowlitz PUD, 12 other utilities recently selected the Cannon AMI solution and Yukon Advanced Energy Services Platform as their complete AMI solution. These include Eastern Iowa Light and Power, Wilton, IA; Empire Electric Association, Inc., Cortez, CO; Perennial Public Power District, York, NE; Tri-County Electric Cooperative, Lancaster, MO; Wheat Belt Public Power District, Sidney, NE; Boone REMC, Lebanon, IN; BARC Electric Cooperative, Millboro, VA; Heartland Power Cooperative, Thompson, IA; Butler Public Power District, David City, NE; Maquoketa Valley Electric Cooperative, Anamosa, IA; North East Mississippi Electric Power Association, Oxford, MS; and HomeWorks Tri-County Electric Cooperative, Portland, MI.

More than 200 electric cooperatives throughout North America now utilize the capabilities of the Cannon AMI solution and the Yukon Platform. The Yukon platform provides utilities the opportunity to expand their system to include demand response, centralized capacitor bank control, substation integration and monitoring, feeder automation, outage detection and notification, recloser and regulator controls, protective relays and NERC-compliant enterprise-wide substation data all on one, easy-to-use platform.

"Demand for automation solutions has grown significantly over the past few years," said Cooper Power Systems group president, Mike Stoessl. "To meet this demand we formed our Energy Automation Solutions business, which includes solutions from Cannon and Cybectec and we have seen outstanding growth. Cannon AMI is the new standard for electric utilities' rural AMI."

Wed May 14 16:50:00 CDT 2008