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Elster announces that the two companies have executed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to integrate Itron's OpenWay advanced communications platform with Elster's REX2™ and A3 ALPHA® meters. Under the terms of the MOU, Itron will develop an OpenWay communications board to be integrated with Elster smart meters at Elster's manufacturing facility in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Elster smart meters are the first alternate meter source to be announced for OpenWay. Itron has already contracted for more than 4 million OpenWay CENTRON® meters, which are fully compliant with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) C12.19 and C12.22 standards for storage and transport of register data over a network. By utilizing these standards, the OpenWay system provides a secure open-standards approach to data collection and communications with the meter.

The REX2 meter utilizes ANSI C12.22 to provide a highly accurate, standards-based Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) platform. The REX2 meter is part of Elster's AMI meter family with 1.5 million meters shipped.

"The standards-based approach utilized by both Itron's OpenWay meters and Elster's smart meters allows our organizations to offer more choices to our customers," says Russ Vanos, Itron vice president of marketing. "A business problem as pervasive as energy measurement and management requires this type of collaboration to best meet the needs of today's utilities."

"Elster is dedicated to developing and manufacturing standards-based smart meters that allow us to work with AMI providers to meet our customers' needs," stated David Hart, senior vice president of products and quality for Elster Electricity. "Elster is pleased to be working with Itron to offer our customers REX2 and A3 ALPHA meters with OpenWay advanced functionality."

OpenWay combines open standards with advanced functionality including interval data collection, time-of-use metering, load limiting remote disconnect, outage and meter tamper detection, remote firmware updates, as well as ZigBee®-based home area network connectivity. OpenWay has been designed to meet today's business and operational needs for meter data collection while empowering customers to actively and frequently participate in demand response and energy conservation.

The REX2 meter platform brings many enhancements that support emerging needs of smart grid initiatives, such as enhanced memory, greater security , remote upgradeability and a fully integrated service control switch with over three years field experience. The A3 ALPHA is a standards based meter using Elster's proven digital measurement techniques that offer high accuracy, repeatability and low ownership costs and can be easily integrated into a variety of automated meter reading (AMR) and AMI solutions by adding option boards to the meter.

Thu Jul 24 08:46:00 CDT 2008

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