Lucky Number is Seven, as Iberdrola Selects Smart Meter Vendors for Next Stage of Rollout

Seven manufacturers have been selected by Bilbao, Spain-based Iberdrola, S.A., to provide a total of one million smart meters for the next stage of the company’s nationwide rollout.   

The participating companies include: ZIV MEDIDA SL (Spain), Landis + Gyr (Switzerland), Sagemcom (France), Sogecam (Spain), Orbis (Spain), Elster (United States) and General Electric (United States). The total contract is worth €300 million ($395 million). The company has not specified how many meters each of the vendors will supply.

Itron (United States), which deployed 100,000 meters in Castellón, Spain, during the pilot phase, has not been selected for this part of the project.

Through the STAR (News - Alert) project – the acronym for Sistemas de Telegestión y Automatización de la Red in Spanish, which translates into Remote Grid Management and Automation System in English – Iberdrola eventually will invest €2 billion ($2.64 billion) by 2018 in the Spanish grid – upgrading more than 10.3 million legacy domestic meters; and adapting more than 80,000 transformers, which will be equipped with remote management, supervision, and automation capabilities. 

In the Basque Country – an autonomous community in northern Spain – the company currently is engaged in with the Basque Government, via the energy entity, EVE (Electric utility Ente Vasco de la Energía), based in the Province of Biscay.  The goals of this €60 million (US$79 million) project, led by Iberdrola and EVE are:

• Installing 230,000 electricity smart meters in the Spanish cities of Bilbao and Portugalete;
• Adapting 1,100 transformers;
• Implementing time-of-use tariffs to help customers save energy and money;
• Providing remote connection and disconnection, as well as managing outages;
• Integrating distributed generation, mainly renewables – especially solar;
• Enabling electric vehicle charging when conditions are favorable – mostly at night, when wind power generation rises; and
• Reducing peak demand.

In addition, Iberdrola is updating its infrastructure in the Madrid region, and in other parts of the country – among them, Murcia, Extremadura, Castile-La Mancha, and Valencia.

Meanwhile, according to e-meter.com , Spain’s largest utility, Endesa, is pressing forward with its own smart meter rollout. Together, Iberdrola and Endesa are making substantial progress toward creating a Spanish smart grid. Both utilities are looking at the whole picture, which includes benefits across their entire systems, not just operating benefits coming from smart meters.