National Grid serves over 7 million customers across New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The Programmes are expected to enrol over 400 MW of DR and other DERs over a three year timeframe. This will deliver significant cost savings to participating businesses while helping National Grid reduce operational expenses and investments in transmission and distribution infrastructure, lowering costs for all National Grid customers.
The company is planning to implement five Programme in the first year of operation across its entire service territory, including the New York Emergency DR Programme (EDRP), the New York Distribution Load Relief Programme (DLRP), the New York Commercial System Relief Programme (CSRP), the Massachusetts Connected Solutions Programme, and the Rhode Island Connected Solutions Programme.
Eligible commercial and industrial customers can enrol in the Programme through vendors such as EnerNOC, CPower, NRG, IP Keys, and Direct Energy.
National Grid will use AutoGrid Flex to unify management of these Programmes 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 Programme will be able to manage their participation through AutoGrid Engage, AutoGrid’s multi-tenant customer engagement application.
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 programme 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 Flex will help us deliver innovative flexibility management Programmes to our business customers, enabling them to reduce their energy costs and meet their sustainability goals” said Carlos Nouel, Vice President of New Energy Solutions, National Grid. “We look forward to leveraging AutoGrid Flex’s powerful optimization capabilities to improve the reliability of our operations and to support initiatives that not only deliver savings to our customers but reimagine how we engage with our customers.”
Dr. Amit Narayan, CEO of AutoGrid, added that National Grid has been a leader in developing innovative new business models to address the world’s most urgent energy challenges, and that by unifying management of these flexibility management programmes, National Grid is demonstrating how utilities of the future will use flexibility management to deliver value to their customers and succeed in the new distributed energy world
In subsequent years, National Grid may expand the use of AutoGrid Flex for other non-wires alternative initiatives. These include innovative new Programmes 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.
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