AutoGrid Systems announced a record year that saw rapid adoption of its flexibility management application suite, AutoGrid Flex, with its distributed energy resource (DER) capacity under contract growing 350%, from 550 MW to 2 GW. Last year marks the second successive year in which AutoGrid has increased its DER capacity under contract by more than 350% — DER capacity under contract increased from 150 MW in 2014 to 550 MW in 2015.
AutoGrid Flex mines the Energy Internet’s rich data lode to extract the highest value from all distributed energy resources.
The DERs managed by AutoGrid Flex include a wide variety of flexible energy assets across all customer segments, including residential, commercial, and industrial. DERs currently managed by AutoGrid Flex include demand response and pricing programs, energy storage systems, residential EV chargers, industrial control equipment, and others.
In addition to the exponential growth in DER capacity under contract, AutoGrid won 100% of the competitive bids for demand response management systems (DRMS) that went through an open RFP process in 2016.
In total, AutoGrid added fifteen new customers, across both regulated and deregulated energy markets, and saw more than 100% year-over-year growth in total bookings and annual recurring revenues in 2016.
In 2016 AutoGrid also launched AutoGrid Flex 3.0, the energy industry’s first comprehensive flexibility management solution for demand response (DR) management, distributed energy resource management, and virtual power plants (VPPs).
AutoGrid Flex 3.0 features several new energy storage co-optimization capabilities that enable energy service providers to maximize the value of energy storage systems at the local site level, manage energy storage assets in combination with demand response and other types of DERs, and optimize aggregation and dispatch from a portfolio of energy storage and other DERs.
These capabilities enable energy service providers to use energy storage to realize multiple business objectives, dramatically improving energy storage project economics while also increasing flexible capacity at the grid edge.
In 2016 AutoGrid Flex 3.0’s energy storage capabilities were selected by customers in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, for a wide spectrum of residential and commercial and industrial (C&I) behind-the-meter use cases.
AutoGrid further extended its market leadership in the flexibility management software category when it was the only vendor to be simultaneously positioned as a Leader on Navigant Research’s Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Software and Demand Response Management System (DRMS) Leaderboard reports.
In addition to strengthening its position as a leader in the flexibility management software, AutoGrid completed a $20 million funding round led by a consortium of strategic investors representing leading energy companies with more than $200 billion in total market capitalization and collectively serving over 100 million customers around the globe.
The consortium included Energy Impact Partners, a New York based investment firm representing some of the largest utilities in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific; Envision Energy, one of the largest renewable energy developers and technology providers in the world; Total Energy Ventures (TEV), the corporate venture arm of Total S.A.; and E.ON, one of the largest utilities and renewable energy developers in the world.
“The exploding growth of renewables, declining cost of energy storage, accelerated deployment of energy intensive IoT devices, and increasing market deregulation are all creating an urgent need for business model innovation amongst utilities, electricity retailers and other energy service providers,” said Dr. Amit Narayan, CEO of AutoGrid.
“By offering energy service providers the opportunity to control, optimize and monetize flexible capacity from a wide variety of networked DERs, AutoGrid Flex allows them to innovate rapidly and win in the new distributed energy world.”
Filed Under: News, Software
