Echelon Corporation, through its partner ELO announced a 1,500 unit pilot in Brazil at Cemig's City of the Future project in the Sete Lagoas region, which includes 95,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers. Serving over seven million customers, Cemig is the largest power company in Brazil. Leveraging its proven Energy Control Networking Platform, Echelon provides smart metering sub-systems to ELO.

The Brazilian market is in need of a multi-application smart grid infrastructure, which the Echelon solution provides more than just traditional metering, thanks to some of the highest non-technical loss rates in the world, and increased use of distributed generation.

Its primary goals are to improve operational efficiency, validate new services, assess benefits and motivate customer engagement through meter installation, workshops, and monitoring.

Offering a heterogeneous network, economic profile, and range of applications, Sete Lagoas was chosen because it includes a range of old and new infrastructure within high, medium and low voltage, telecommunications systems.

Ron Sege, chairman and CEO of Echelon, stated that the Brazilian market, due to its strong fundamental economic drivers, represents a large and attractive opportunity and it is pleased to show successful trials through its partner ELO.

"We are successfully targeting growing markets, applying our power line communication and Control Operating System (COS) software and laying the groundwork for a multi-application edge-of-the-grid solution with high profile local partners such as ELO," added Sege.

The long awaited regulations regarding the deployment of smart meters throughout Brazil was announced this past August by Brazil's National Agency of Electrical Energy, ANEEL. According to the new regulations, all new meter installations must be required to be smart meters by 2014.