AutoGrid Selected by Bonneville Power Administration for Demand Response Across Its Service Territory

AutoGrid Demand Response Optimization and Management System (DROMS) will enable fast demand response at Bonneville for managing peak capacity and renewable intermittency.

November 11, 2014
AutoGrid Systems’ award-winning demand response (DR) application has been selected to implement and manage advanced DR demonstrations for Bonneville Power Administration (BPA).  Under the initiative, DROMS will enable BPA to schedule and automate events and see actual load shed during events.

Established in 1937, BPA is responsible for marketing wholesale electricity to municipal utilities, co-operatives, investor-owned utilities, Native American tribal utilities and other customers.  In all, BPA serves 142 firm power customers, which in turn provide power to millions of consumers and businesses in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, western Montana and small parts of California, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Approximately 30 percent of the power used in the region comes from BPA.

As the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest power marketing administration, BPA required a robust standards-based automated demand response system. AutoGrid’s DROMS application will allow BPA to plan and execute demand response events, helping BPA achieve its mission to provide its customers with reliable and affordable electricity.

BPA’s DROMS implementation features a unified view across all programs and participants that gets updated in real-time with information on load shed and other aspects of operations, providing BPA program managers and system operators an intuitive interface to review and manage all their DR resources.

“BPA’s program is one of the most innovative uses of automated demand response in the nation involving stringent real-time processing requirements,” said Amit Narayan, founder & CEO at AutoGrid. “We are pleased to be serving BPA on their next generation needs of creating a truly open standards-based dispatch grade DR system.”

AutoGrid DROMS application delivers the industry’s first-of-its-kind, fully integrated demand response management capabilities that include:

•    Ability to Create Flexible DR Programs: Using AutoGrid DROMS, utilities can offer the widest choice of programs to their residential, commercial and industrial customers to maximize customer satisfaction, improve program enrolment, and increase total megawatts available from demand response. AutoGrid DROMS supports all variations of DR, including traditional direct load control, critical peak pricing, variable pricing, real-time pricing, peak-time rebate, demand & capacity bidding programs, as well as the more advanced energy and ancillary services programs such as spinning reserves and regulation services.
•    A Unified View of Available Resources Across All Programs: DROMS allows DR program managers and grid system operators to view available capacity across all customer segments, load types, geographic locations, and programs from a single dashboard, making it easier to dispatch these resources optimally as part of the generation stack
•    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, converting DR into a reliable, Dispatch Grade resource.
•    Open Standards Based Communication: AutoGrid DROMS supports the widest ecosystem of devices and all commonly used industry standards, such as OpenADR 1.0 and 2.0a/b, SEP 1.x over AMI, and SEP 2.0, providing utilities and their customers an unprecedented choice of hardware devices that can be used to automate their DR operations. This results in lower cost by avoiding any proprietary “vendor lock” for customers.
•    Powerful Measurement, Verification, Analytics and Reporting: DROMS 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: Using a highly scalable and secure architecture, the system can be hosted on public or private clouds and process millions of endpoints and petabytes of data.

Such utilities as Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Austin Energy, E.ON, PSEG-LI, Hawaii Electric, Southern California Edison, Florida Power & Light, and the City of Palo Alto Utilities are using AutoGrid’s big data analytics technology to improve the reliability and productivity of their operations. AutoGrid technology is also embedded in software products from leading vendors, such as Schneider Electric, NTT Data, and Silver Spring Networks.

Press Contact
Sandra Kwak
+1.415.374.9400
[email protected]