Duke Energy puts $15.8M into Echelon's smart metering

Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) had two announcements today that spanned from California, on one side of the Pacific Ocean, to China on the other.

San Jose, Calif.-based Echelon (Nasdaq:ELON) entered into a $15.8 million long-term agreement today to supply Duke Energy's smart grid program with its Networked Energy Services system. Echelon is a networking company that provides products and systems to help monitor and save energy, while Duke is the third-largest U.S. utility.

Echelon’s NES System provides utilities with an advanced metering infrastructure that delivers services such as automated meter readings, outage detection, and accurate data collection (see What's so smart about smart metering?). The meters are accessible via a Web services-based network operating system.

Under the agreement, deliveries are expected to start at the end of the quarter.

Duke Energy has regulatory approval to deploy smart grid infrastructure in Ohio. The five-year deployment, starting this year, includes more than 700,000 electric smart meters in Ohio.

Duke Energy is seeking approval from Indiana regulators to install smart grid technology, including approximately 800,000 smart meters. The company also wants to bring the technology to the other three states it serves, North and South Carolina and Kentucky.

With a full deployment of the NES system, Ohio and Indiana offer Echelon a more than $150 million revenue opportunity.

But Echelon isn’t just deploying its systems domestically. Last year, Danish utility SEAS-NVE awarded an advanced metering infrastructure project to Echelon partner Eltel Networks, based in Finland (see Danish utility to use Echelon's smart grid systems).

And although it's unclear whether the two deals are related, Duke Energy struck a three-year agreement with San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO) last month to develop smart grid infrastructure based on Internet Protocol technology (see Duke Energy taps Cisco for 3-year smart grid project).

On the other side of the Pacific, Duke Energy entered into a memorandum of understanding today with China’s biggest electric utility China Huaneng Group to explore renewable and other clean technologies (see Duke Energy, China’s top utility ink deal to hunt for cleantech investments).