Itron Inc., of Liberty Lake, has been chosen by Iberdrola S.A., Spain's largest energy company and one of the world's biggest such concerns, to develop the first phase of the energy giant's smart utility-metering program in Spain.

Iberdrola, based in Bilbao, which is in northern Spain, has some 32,400 employees and does business in nearly 40 countries, including the U.S.

It claims to be the world's largest producer of wind power and bought Scottish Power, which had been a leading developer of wind power in the Pacific Northwest, in 2007.

Itron says that under its contract with Iberdrola, it will develop an advanced utility meter management system for Iberdrola's utility meter network in Spain. Smart metering involves utilities' use of advanced two-way communications capabilities with their customers to encourage energy use when load is light and to shed load by turning off store lighting or air-conditioning when the load on their system gets too heavy.

"The initial deployment will see the delivery of 100,000 meters to the city of Castellon, Spain, with the potential to expand to 10 million meters countrywide," Itron says. "The first phase of the project is expected to run from July until the end of 2010."

"There's very big potential," says Sharelynn Moore, Itron's Liberty Lake-based director of marketing and communications.

Itron didn't release a dollar value of the contract, and Moore says the order "is more strategic than it is high end in numbers" right now.

The company called the project "one of the largest and most important smart metering initiatives in Europe." It said the project would be based on the PRIME telecommunications protocol, which Moore says is "a central standard that anyone can adopt."

Itron has a big foreign subsidiary that includes manufacturing capability and sales and distribution personnel in Barcelona, Spain, Moore says.

"Itron is delighted that its industry expertise and project experience will help lay the foundation for a state-of-the-art smart metering architecture in Spain," says Marcel Regnier, chief operating officer of Itron's international division, which is based in Brussels, Belgium.