We are in the middle of peak summer season across the northern hemisphere and the electric grid is already groaning and straining under increased demand. Rolling power outages, alarming spot market energy prices, failing power plants and last minute cries for help from the grid operators, have become the norm. Not so for utilities that have planned ahead and use demand flexibility surgically. For them, a peaking summer day is business as usual. They have flourished managing peak load (and reliability) by forecasting and controlling demand using a variety of grid-edge assets and hedged themselves against whopping energy costs for their consumers. Using AutoGrid’s AI driven flexibility management platform, our customers have thus far:
- Launched over 1000 peak demand management events
- Reduced 10GWh of pricey energy
- Controlled over 1 million grid-edge resources
- Offset over 600MWs of dirty power plant usage
Difficult to believe? Consider this: in one day alone in July, one of our customers in Asia reduced energy demand by 300 megawatts – equivalent to a power plant! They successfully enabled participation of over 600,000 residential customers, industrial plants and commercial enterprises. Collective effort with a dash of AutoGrid’s AI can indeed work wonders!
We are extremely proud of our customers for realizing their decarbonization goals while protecting their consumers from exorbitant energy costs. However, it is not lost on us that this is just the beginning. As distributed energy resource (DER) adoption increases, strategically using them for a variety of grid services (frequency regulation, demand shaving, transmission and distribution avoided costs, hosting capacity increase to name a few) is AutoGrid’s mantra. We have enabled our customers to utilize electric vehicle fleets, solar and storage microgrids, grid-scale storage, thermostats, building management systems (BMS), industrial controllers and HVAC systems for grid support. Not to mention the terawatt hours of clean energy from renewables that also get traded on our platform.
As key electricity markets in ERCOT, CAISO, AEMO(Australia), RTE (France) and other geographies rapidly integrate renewables, the need for grid flexibility becomes increasingly critical to balance volatility. Utilities in emerging markets are additionally leapfrogging and using flexibility as a central grid management strategy instead of building expensive infrastructure. AutoGrid will continue to serve and provide the necessary tools for our existing and future customers as they scale. Flexibility is hot!
Power Down Dirty Peaker, Clean Up with Virtual Power Plants
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