National Grid selected AutoGrid to unify management of its demand response and distributed energy resource programs across its service area in North America.
The programs are expected to enroll over 400 MW of demand response and other distributed energy resources over a 3-year timeframe. These programs will deliver cost savings to participating businesses while helping National Grid reduce operational expenses and investments in transmission and distribution infrastructure, which will lower costs for all National Grid customers.
National Grid plans to implement five programs in the first year of operation across its entire service territory. These include the New York Emergency DR Program, the New York Distribution Load Relief Program, the New York Commercial System Relief Program, the Massachusetts Connected Solutions Program, and the Rhode Island Connected Solutions Program. Eligible commercial and industrial customers can enroll in the program through vendors such as EnerNOC, CPower, NRG, IP Keys, and Direct Energy.
National Grid will use AutoGrid Flex to unify management of these programs across all customers through a single dashboard, using it for event dispatch, measurement and verification, and reporting for all customers.
In addition, the aggregators participating in the program will be able to manage their participation through AutoGrid Engage, AutoGrid’s multi-tenant customer engagement application. In subsequent years, National Grid may expand the use of AutoGrid Flex for other non-wires alternative initiatives.
These include innovative new programs that optimize customer-sited energy storage systems, solar power systems, EV chargers, industrial control equipment, and other DERs, providing National Grid with yet another source of flexible capacity to balance supply and demand on the grid.
AutoGrid Flex and AutoGrid Engage enable utilities, electricity retailers, and other energy service providers to manage a diverse set of distributed energy resources across all customer and program types, helping them launch new services that reduce costs, increase revenues, improve customer engagement, and enhance system reliability.
AutoGrid Flex includes four flexibility management modules — AutoGrid DROMS, AutoGrid DERMS AutoGrid VPP, and AutoGrid ESMS — that all run on a unified platform that uses AutoGrid’s Predictive Controls technology to provide energy service providers with a comprehensive flexibility management solution for all types of DERs such as battery storage, EV chargers, thermostats, load control switches, pool-pumps, water heaters, co-generation units, backup generators, and industrial demand response.
AutoGrid Engage is a residential, commercial and industrial customer engagement application that incorporates AutoGrid’s advanced analytics and big data processing capabilities to provide relevant and personalized pricing and DER offers to residential, commercial and industrial customers, deliver real-time optimization to increase customer savings and program participation.
Using AutoGrid Flex and AutoGrid Engage, energy companies can differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive new energy world by offering highly personalized flexibility management programs to all their customers. Energy consumers can get significant savings in an automated and convenient manner from their trusted energy provider.
By utilizing the unified AutoGrid Flex application to implement their entire flexibility management roadmap, energy companies gain significant time-to-market and cost advantages over the alternative of trying to implement a hodge-podge of point solutions that require expensive and time consuming work to integrate with their complex backend systems and operational processes. AutoGrid Flex’s powerful portfolio optimization capabilities allow energy companies to optimize their entire DER portfolio across all programs in real-time, and at scale, significantly boosting their portfolio’s return on investment.
