Love Smart Meter, Hey Brazil, You Want Some Power Conservation?
Brazil: The Next Hot Smart Meter Market
By Jeff St. John
Will Brazil be the next big market for smart meters? With a government mandate calling for the installation of about 62 million digital, networked electric meters by decade’s end, South America’s biggest country (pop. 201 million) is definitely becoming a target — and Silver Spring Networks is the latest to put the country in its sights.
Silver Spring — the smart grid networking startup considered most likely to IPO — announced this week it would work with Swiss metering giant Landis+Gyr on a smart grid solution for Brazil. Silver Spring also announced that it incorporated in Brazil earlier this year with an office in the country’s business center of São Paulo.
Landis+Gyr, in turn, has developed the first smart meter system to be approved by Brazilian regulators, and has set a target of deploying 200,000 meters in the near future. Itron is also a big player in Brazil, and Esco Technologies subsidiary Aclara has been targeting the country, along with other Latin American countries such as Colombia, for the past few years.
Then there’s Echelon, which last year partnered with ELO Sistemas Electronicos to supply the Brazilian meter manufacturer with its NES smart meter technology. Brazil has steep tariffs that encourage smart meter vendors to either build factories in the country, as Itron and Landis+Gyr have done, or partner with local manufacturers, as Echelon did (pdf).
ELO serves some 40 electric power distributors in Brazil with a combined 55 million customers, and also works in other Latin American countries. It hasn’t yet rolled out its Echelon-enabled meters beyond undisclosed pilot projects, but is considering it for projects in Brazil and across South America, Jeff Lund, Echelon’s vice president of business development, told me in an interview on Wednesday.
Brazil’s a tempting market for smart meter makers, partly because the country’s utilities tend to have many millions of customers apiece, said Ben Schuman, analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. While the country has moved slowly to set guidelines for its smart meter mandates, it could see some mass deployments as early as 2012, and could become one of the biggest smart meter markets of the world by the second half of the decade, he said. 
As one of the first South American countries to plan nationwide smart metering, Brazil could also be an important testing ground for deployments in the rest of the continent. As with emerging markets like India, stopping power theft and fixing too-frequent power outages are key functions that Latin American utilities want out of their smart meter networks.
Echelon’s partnership with ELO also shows how technology from U.S. and European smart meter vendors could find its way into domestic metering companies — a trend that could open the Latin American market to smart meter system-on-a-chip makers as well.
comment by Don Ames
Interesting that many countries will be deploying the smart meter for various reasons. In the article, Jeff writes that perhaps Brazil is really interested in the smart meter technology to help with frequent power outages and to help stop power theft. Here, in the America’s North of Panama, I have not heard that the smart meter would be beneficial for “fixing too-frequent” power outages or for stopping power theft. Sounds like the rest of the world may find additional uses for the technology that some of us have not yet thought of. Or, perhaps there is a way we can use the technology to get free power. I have heard of this concern, the computer geek on your block hacking your signal and adding his power consumption to your bill.
Hey, this is really getting fun. Hopefully, we will have more delight in using the smart meter technology to find new ways to lower our power bill and we will not spend too much time, or delight, trying to figure out how to add our power usage on to the neighbors bill.