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Winning the New Utility World with Best-in-Class Flexibility Management Solutions

Utilities Tech Outlook | Wednesday, August 07, 2019

Flexibility management presents utility service providers with the opportunity to succeed in a new distributed energy world, and if smartly implemented, the utilities can realize unparalleled benefits.  

FREMONT, CA: The pioneer in flexibility management software for the energy and utility industries, AutoGrid institutes AutoGrid Systems KK (AutoGrid KK). The wholly-owned subsidiary will deliver direct sales and technical support to serve the company’s rapidly expanding customer base better. AutoGrid invests in efforts to assist the electricity industry in imbibing technologies in the renewable energy landscape, enabling it to leverage artificial intelligence to manage DERs and build novel business models.  

“AutoGrid considers Japan one of our most important strategic regions in the world, with its swift deregulation and strong momentum toward adoption of new energy technologies,” remarks Dr. Amit Narayan, CEO of AutoGrid. “The Japanese government has mandated a near doubling of renewable energy generation by 2030. Our direct presence there will better enable our customers to leverage the virtual power plant (VPP) capabilities of AutoGrid Flex® to integrate more renewables by aggregating, dispatching and marketing flexible energy from demand response (DR) and distributed energy resources (DERs).”

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Japan is among the world’s most dynamic energy markets. The increased adoption of retail competition, deregulation, renewable energy, and energy storage are creating immense opportunities along with technological and marketing challenges, which AutoGrid products can solve. AutoGrid KK constitutes the latest in a series of AutoGrid investments in the market. It comes from the company’s partnership with Japanese energy services and trading organization ENERES. AutoGrid software will support ENERES establish the world’s most extensive storage VPP by asset volume.

 “As solar and storage costs continue to decline and new capacity markets open, DER and DR resources are becoming a key component of our daily operations,” adds Masahiro Kobayashi, President and Representative Director of ENERES. “AutoGrid Flex gives us a proven, AI-driven comprehensive distributed energy management solution that allows us to fully leverage our own DER and DR resources and those of our customers in real-time.”

The energy landscape is undergoing a fundamental transformation with an exploding renewable energy capacity. This is putting tremendous pressure on electricity retailers and other energy service providers to come up with a solution to balance supply and demand on the distributed and multi-directional grid. Besides, providers also need answers to keep up with the competition by finding new methods to lower expenses and generate new revenue streams and enhance customer engagement all by offering customers more energy choice and flexibility.

A new way of tackling this challenge is flexibility management, which facilitates energy service providers to predict, streamline, and manage energy resources by allowing it to be controlled in real-time and at scale. AutoGrid provides energy industry’s first truly integrated flexibility management suite. With the on-demand, flexible capacity delivered by AutoGrid, utilities and energy service providers can seamlessly navigate the transition from the conventional, centralized, one-way grid to a modern, distributed, renewable energy-powered and multi-directional grid.

AutoGrid aims to develop software applications that create a smarter, distributed energy world. The company’s flexibility management solution allows energy providers to provide clean, affordable, and reliable energy by governing distributed energy resources in real-time and at scale. It has contracted more than 5,000 megawatts of DERs and works with more than 50 leading energy companies around the world. By allowing energy service providers to streamline the flexible capacity from all possible types of DERs, from all customers, and any program, AutoGrid offers them with the intelligence they need to maximize the benefits of flexibility management and win in the new energy world.

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