Yet another major European electricity operator has chosen Westermo to deliver remote substation connectivity. The project involves integrating renewable energy into the grid and decarbonizing the electricity network. This project follows on from numerous successes in recent years, including an Austrian project that uses private LTE to seamlessly connect as many as 8000 substations. 

As part of this strategic long-term framework agreement, Merlin's rugged cellular routers, factory configuration services, and automated provisioning software Activator will support a variety of Smart Grid applications. An initial contract with Westermo valued at approximately 22 million Swedish krona (2 million euro) has been signed, with the potential of scaling up deployment by a factor of four.

Within the first four years of the rollout, the energy operator expects to have tens of thousands of monitoring devices operational, using the Zero-touch deployment tool, Activator. A comprehensive market consultation led to this award and the customer concluded, like many others who rely on Activator and Monitor software for provisioning and monitoring, that the ‘Activator’ management system has a considerable advantage over alternative solutions. 

Designed to meet the requirements of the IEC 61850-3 standard for medium voltage substations, the Merlin series of robust cellular routers from Westermo are ideally suited to networking applications in the energy sector. They also offer the highest levels of galvanic isolation and security. 

Remote provisioning, management, and control tools are also available on the routers. This makes networks easier to build, operate, and upgrade, making them less costly and carbon-intensive to build, operate, and upgrade.

"Westermo is delighted to play such a key role in this important strategic project, providing routers designed, developed and manufactured in Ireland,”
- Declan Carew, managing director of Westermo Ireland.

The combination of secure hardware, software and a management platform with unique mass configuration capabilities is typical of what this industry demands and why Westermo is having such traction in the energy market.

Declan Carew, Managing Director of Westermo Ireland

"This contract shows Westermo's strength in supporting large-scale remote access deployments in the energy sector, where quality and reliability are essential, said Jenny Sjödahl, CEO at Westermo.

"Our commitment to sustainability and supply chain security provided by our own manufacturing facilities laid the foundation for our success in this project."