Aclara Technologies and its affiliates, including Aclara Meters, have taken a significant step to support its growing international businesses with the opening of a new headquarters for international operations in Bilbao, Spain and a new office in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Aclara now operates two facilities in Bilbao to serve the international market in EMEA, Asia and Latin America. The new facilities will support a comprehensive portfolio of solutions to the electric, water and gas utilities and will house the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) electric development center. It encompasses all product lines with an emphasis on the electric and water sectors, and is home to Aclara’s IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) electric meters development center. The state-of-the-art facility also features a full support meter development test lab on site. Located nearby, a second facility is dedicated to meter manufacturing and logistics.
The Cambridge office supports Aclara’s expanding business and its technical support team in the UK. The facility is the hub for rolling out smart meters to Aclara’s energy customers and the growing smart grid sensor business that serves distribution network operators in the UK, as well as Aclara’s growing gas and water business in Europe.
“These developments are an important aspect of our transformation into a new Aclara, as we strategically expand our global reach in Europe and other parts of the world, and increase the breadth of our offering to span game-changing, end-to-end solutions for electric, gas and water utilities around the world,” said Allan Connolly, Aclara president and CEO.
Aclara, which serves more than 800 utilities globally, has been aggressively growing its business in Europe and other parts of the globe.In December 2015, Aclara acquired the electric meters business operating within GE Energy Management’s Grid Solutions subdivision and in August 2016 Aclara purchased the award-winning grid monitoring platform from Tollgrade Communications, Inc., which includes smart grid sensors with Predictive Grid Analytics software.
Demand for smart infrastructure solutions (SIS) that harness the power of leading-edge software continues to accelerate around the world. An example is Europe 2020, the European Union’s growth strategy that addresses sustainability. As part of this initiative, the majority of EU member countries have agreed to roll out gas and electricity smart meters to 80 percent of the population by 2020 and 100 percent by 2022. In the UK alone, the government is encouraging utilities to complete installation of 53 million smart meters by 2020.
These EU regulations in electricity and gas smart metering pave the way for national policies to include smart meter solutions for water utilities. Other specific water meter and non-revenue water reduction mandates in some markets also support water smart meter development. With the drive to decrease non-revenue water, water meter deployments across Europe are expected to increase by 28 percent from an installed base of 11 million meters by 2026. In the UK alone, the smart water metering market is forecasted to grow 12 percent over the next five years.
The UK has also taken the lead as Europe’s fastest-growing solar market, set to double its use of renewable energy to meet its 2020 carbon reduction goals. Achieving this goal will necessitate that Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) increase grid edge intelligence and agility in the distribution network to manage renewables intermittency, shifting loads, capacity constraints, and bidirectional power flow.
“As utilities around the world seek smart solutions to propel them forward into the future, Aclara is ideally poised to bring best-of-breed solutions to distribution operators that will benefit from our technological edge and deep experience,” Connolly noted.
