Austin Energy and AutoGrid Systems Collaborate on Standards-Based Automated Demand Response to Usher in a New Era of Retail Choice for the Demand Response Market

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 26, 2013) - AutoGrid Systems, a leader in Big Data Analytics for the electricity and energy industry, is proud to announce that it will collaborate with Austin Energy, one of the nation's leading community owned utilities, to deploy and enhance its Demand Response Optimization and Management System (DROMS).

Under the initiative, Austin Energy will initially use DROMS to monitor and manage peak power at selected residences and EVSEs (electric vehicle supply equipment) in its service territory. As the program expands, DROMS will allow Austin energy to obtain a unified view of all demand side resources in its service territory across all customer classes and load categories.

DROMS will interface with smart thermostats and home energy management equipment from a variety of manufacturers that are purchased by consumers at retail stores or online. This unique, first-of-a-kind retail aggregation model allows unprecedented technology choice for customers to help increase program adoption and overall satisfaction.

AutoGrid's DROMS will also be employed to analyze data related to consumer behavior, the impact of pricing signals, and the effectiveness of different demand management strategies to help Austin Energy optimize future demand management programs. In addition, Austin Energy will be working with AutoGrid to design demand side management programs that could lay the foundation for ancillary services for grid balancing needs and better integration with existing ERCOT market programs.

The deployment will be funded in partly by the Department of Energy's Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Austin Energy will additionally provide funding for further development and deployment of this technology.

"We are very excited to work with Austin Energy, one of the true visionaries in the electric utility industry. The utility has been at the forefront of modernizing our electric system," said Dr. Amit Narayan, founder and CEO of AutoGrid. "The results we achieve with Austin Energy will create a blueprint for the rest of the nation on implementing open, scalable and extensible demand side management programs. By drastically reducing the cost and time involved in implementing these programs, improving customer adoption and satisfaction through more choice, and improving program yields through sophisticated optimization technology, this project and will help expand the overall market for demand side management."

Austin Energy is the nation's eighth largest community-owned electric utility, serving more than 420,000 customers. The utility is a recognized leader in renewable energy, smart grid technologies, and energy efficiency initiatives as well as integrating these technologies into commercial operations. It has set goals of getting 35 percent of its power from renewable resources by 2020 while reducing emissions to 20 percent below 2005 levels.

AutoGrid's Energy Data Platform is dynamic, cloud-based system that analyzes the complex interrelationships between power consumers and assets connected to the grid. Similar to e-commerce engines or algorithms for predicting weather, EDP mines petabytes of structured and unstructured data from smart meters and other equipment along with physics-based models to generate accurate, near-term forecasts concerning power consumption, the impact of pricing signals, or the effect of demand shifts on transmission and distribution lines. EDP can also be used to integrate intermittent renewable resources like solar or wind or replace spinning reserve services with software-based controls.

DROMS is a cloud-based demand management system that employs Big Data analytics, a physics-based model of the grid and information streams from smart meters and other grid assets to accurately predict electricity demand. The near-term forecasts permit utilities, grid operators and large power consumers to securely shift power consumption to meet financial or operational goals. Requiring no additional hardware, DROMS, the first application based from the Energy Data Platform, can cut the cost of demand response systems by 90 percent while increasing the "yield" of power from demand response events by 30 percent.

DROMS provides:

• A Unified View of All Available Resources Across All Programs. The solution allows utilities and service providers to view available capacity across all customer segments, load types, geographic locations, and programs from a single dashboard. The system supports all variations of traditional direct load control, critical peak pricing, variable pricing, and peak-time rebate.

• Real-Time Load Forecasting and Event Monitoring. Advanced machine learning techniques generate highly accurate real-time predictions of individual loads, response to load shed requests or price signals.

• Comprehensive Networking and Communications. Supports communication and dispatch to any device, over any channel of communication including over AMI networks, broadband Internet and cellular.

• Broad Ecosystem of DR Field Devices. Supports the widest ecosystem of devices and all commonly used industry standards such as OpenADR 1.0 and 2.0, SEP 1.x, as well as a number of other proprietary and legacy protocols.

• 24x7x365 Optimization. Provides dispatch optimization across disparate DR programs and systems, such as load control, time of use, and price response, among others to improve the overall yield and effectiveness of the programs.

• Powerful Measurement, Verification, Analytics and Reporting. Provides a large library of reports for accurately calculating and comparing event and program performances across any customer or program attributes by analyzing actual consumption data from the smart meters immediately on completion of the event.

• High Security, Reliability and Scalability. Customers gain the benefits of enhanced security, reliability and privacy over public or private cloud deployments. Using a highly scalable cloud-based architecture, the system can support millions of connections and petabytes of data.

About AutoGrid Systems

Founded in 2011, AutoGrid is dedicated to bringing the power of Big Data, predictive analytics and Internet scale computational techniques to the production and consumption of electricity. Serving utilities of all sizes, grid operators, electricity retailers, ESCO services companies, and end-users, AutoGrid develops and markets services that both help lower costs and improve reliability of the electricity supply chain. For more, please see our website or contact us.