Smart Metering with RipEX

How do you connect over 35,000 smart meters across a storm-prone city with complex urban terrain—and still achieve 99.9% reliability? In southern Brazil, utility giant Celesc teamed up with RACOM to do exactly that.

Celesc, the largest electricity distributor in Santa Catarina, Brazil, embarked on a bold initiative to modernize its metering infrastructure in the city of Araranguá—automating data collection from approximately 35,400 electricity meters as part of an ambitious AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) pilot. The complexity of the project was significant: it required reliable communication across thousands of endpoints in a challenging urban environment prone to signal interference, extreme weather, and evolving infrastructure.

Celesc entrusted the project to Wasion, a global leader in smart energy technologies. But to ensure seamless, bidirectional communication between thousands of WiSUN-connected meters and the central control system in Florianópolis, a highly resilient and scalable communication backbone was essential.

Wasion selected RACOM’s RipEX series of radio modems—technologies already proven in Celesc’s earlier deployments—to form the wireless backbone of the Araranguá smart grid.

The solution included:

• Smart meters and transformer measurement sets for granular consumption data.
• WiSUN RF mesh (900 MHz license-free) to link meters to local concentrators.
• RipEX2 radio modems (400 MHz licensed band) as a secure, high-speed backbone from concentrators to the central Meter Data Collector (MDC).
• A tree-structured network topology, dividing the city into 120 localized areas with concentrators grouped into 12 high-traffic clusters.
• Throughput up to 1.7 Mbps per RipEX2 link, supporting real-time data transmission to Celesc’s central systems via IP integration.

RACOM’s technical team worked closely with Wasion and local partner Utili to optimize the design. RipEX modems supported simultaneous endpoint and repeater roles, which allowed for adaptive routing and minimized the need for additional infrastructure.

The project successfully delivered:

• 99.9% long-term network reliability, even in the face of local power surges and tropical storms.
• Cost savings, thanks to the repeater functionality of RipEX modems, which reduced infrastructure demands.
• Rapid issue resolution, including on-site challenges such as metallic interference and modem failures due to improper grounding—quickly identified and solved with RACOM’s local support.
• Seamless integration with Celesc’s central control systems, supporting automated, real-time meter reading and grid optimization.

By mid-2024, the Araranguá AMI project stood as a showcase of innovation, reliability, and international collaboration. RACOM’s RipEX modems once again proved their value in building future-ready smart grid communication networks, enabling utility providers like Celesc to deliver smarter, more responsive energy services across Brazil.