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Concord Municipal Light Plant Completes Initial Trial of Edge Control Node

Feb 27, 2013

Echelon Corp., TDJ Consulting, and Concord Municipal Light Plant, a municipal utility responsible for electric service to the town of Concord, Massachusetts, have successfully completed a trial of Echelon's innovative Edge Control Node 7000 control node. The pilot demonstrated valuable applications and set the foundation for CMLP's continued exploration of additional smart grid functionality such as transformer monitoring and power quality monitoring.

The growing need for distribution grid sensor data has promoted projects at CMLP. The municipal utility forecasts a growing need to monitor its assets on the low-voltage grid and anticipates testing additional applications from TDJ and Echelon in the near future.

Concord, Massachusetts, is a picturesque New England village with a revolutionary past. It not only was the location for one of the first battles of the American Revolution and Walden Pond, but was also home to Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Hawthorne. It is located 45 minutes outside Boston and has a population of approximately 16,000.

Echelon's ECN 7000 series nodes, part of its Energy Control Networking Platform, were deployed at strategic locations within the town of Concord. The ECN's open architecture enabled custom hardware and software expansion to automate the collection of data from legacy non-AMI meters, extending the useful life of these meters while offering a means for back office integration and meter data analysis. In addition, one node was placed next to a critical distribution transformer, enabling it to also monitor the transformer and provide near real-time measurements of power quality data such as voltage and current at the distribution transformer level. Turning such legacy transformers at key locations into "smart transformers" without forklift replacement offers Concord a cost-effective way to track the health of its distribution transformers. Moreover, because the ECNs are part of Echelon's NES system, the collected data was constantly available both locally and at the head-end.