Smart grid company Elster has announced that its fully integrated universal meter and radio platform, the RexUniversal meter, should be commercially available in North America in the second quarter of 2012.
The RexUniversal meter platform allows EnergyAxis and other smart grid vendors' 900MHz radio frequency mesh communications to run natively on its hardware without the installation of additional components. Elster says that the platform will be the world's first truly universally integrated smart grid platform.
Previously, if a utility wanted to operate one vendor's communications on another vendor's meter, the utility had to have a separate proprietary communications card physically installed in the meter, Elster said.
But with the RexUniversal metering platform, communication protocols can be changed remotely, allowing the device to operate natively in different network systems without requiring hardware replacement. This gives customers more product choice, Elster said.
The manufacturer says that the product is designed to fit its business model of creating “truly open products”.
