Actaris are pleased to announce that Nacka Energi, based in Stockholm, Sweden, have chosen Actaris over several competitors to provide an Automatic Meter Reading solution for electricity. This will be Actaris’ first project working in partnership with communications company, Vodafone Sweden.  The contract has been awarded only a few months after the establishment of this strategic partnership, destined to provide a complete AMR package to Swedish utilities.

Nacka Energi’s contract award comprises 25,000 electricity metering points, including both residential and industrial metering installations. Metering points are primarily located in the south of Stockholm and represent the first such project in Sweden to exclusively utilise “point-to-point” GPRS technology for residential consumers. This implementation is to be completed by the end of 2006 and will be followed by a five-year service agreement. Such a project is set to become a reference not only for the Actaris-Vodafone Sweden partnership but also for the use of GPRS technology in AMR.

Metering regulations introduced recently in Sweden will require all meters to be read monthly by 2009, a development which has moved utilities to look towards cost-effective AMR solutions. The Actaris/Vodafone Sweden package uses the concept of communicating meter data via Vodafone Sweden’s established GSM network and provides a complete end-to-end solution including meters, communication services and easy-to-integrate software supporting system operation and project management.

Rob Rickard, General Manager of Actaris Sweden is aware of the significance of this first project: “This contract award marks an important step in the Actaris strategy to become the leading provider of cost-effective AMR technology.  Working in partnership with Vodafone Sweden has enabled us to propose a solution which combines professionally managed infrastructure and a very competitive life-cycle cost for Nacka Energi.”

Nacka Energi’s Managing Director Håkan Askelöf explained the reason for their choice, “we were looking for an easy and robust system with the fewest possible number of components, in order to minimize potential areas of risk. All this combined with competitive and controllable annual costs and our faith in Actaris’ long-term commitment has been decisive in our choice of Actaris as a supplier of the next generation of metering systems for Nacka Energi AB”.