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Aclara eTWACS Solution Innovates to Exceed Customer Expectations for Power Line Data [Global Data Point](Global Data Point Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The Aclara power-line technology retrieves hourly data from more than 13.5 million meters at more than 360 electric utilities with a read rate higher than 99 percent. The new head end software takes full advantage of the benefits provided by eTWACS, which reads all three phases and all feeders on each substation bus in parallel. The eTWACS solution adds significant capacity for future power line communications, allowing electric utilities to effectively handle smart grid applications, such as outage management, load control, and distribution management using power line communications. "The greatest benefit of eTWACS is the rapid processing of various reads and retries," said Don Flanders, AMI administrator at Rio Grande Electric Cooperative, Brackettville, Texas. "This allows the system to handle pings from PROASYS (Aclara's software for determining meter outages) sooner, which helps our outage management system locate outages during and after a storm." Rio Grande has 13,000 meters deployed across 37,000 square miles. In addition to providing greater capacity for transmitting and receiving data, the two-way functionality of eTWACS provides on-request reads, control of load-shed events, remote connect and disconnect of meters, and the downloading of features like firmware updates. The eTWACS solution is fully backward compatible with previous Aclara technologies, ensuring all endpoints co-exist with eTWACS-enabled meters. (c) 2014 GlobalData Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info). |