Dive Brief:
- New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, one of the largest consumer-owned electric distribution utilities in New England, has tapped AutoGrid to provide three demand response programs for customers who choose to enroll in the utility's “Go Beyond the Peak!” plan.
- The programs include behavioral demand response, time-of-use/critical peak pricing and direct load control programs
- AutoGrid said its Demand Response Optimization & Management System (DROMS) will provide personalized communications with customers, integrated analytics and a "streamlined device provisioning flow" making it easier for utilities to have switches installed.
Dive Insight:
Utilities are increasingly turning to integrated suites of load control solutions, and New Hampshire Electric Cooperative's partnership with AutoGrid builds on this trend. The utility will implement three different demand response programs, all of which operate very differently.
And, the new system is designed to accommodate the future integration of additional distributed energy resources, through the AutoGrid dashboard.
“NHEC’s launch of these three new demand response programs shows how utilities can use the Energy Internet to lower their costs and deeply engage with their customers,” Amit Narayan, CEO of AutoGrid, said in a statement. “The Energy Internet can make our energy system cleaner, more affordable and more reliable.”
The utility's “Peak Days” behavioral program will notify members when a demand response event will occur, encouraging them to lower their energy use during an event. Customers enrolled in the “Peak Planner” variable pricing program agree to reduce their energy use during DR events, securing lower electricity charges and bill credits in return. And the “Peak Plus” direct-control program connects directly to members’ Internet-connected water heaters, space heaters and window air conditioners, lowering the energy these devices use when a DR event occurs.
"The member experience was the most important consideration for us as we designed and rolled out our demand response programs,” said Heather Manypenny, power resources executive at NHEC. “The flexibility offered by AutoGrid DROMS is enabling us to manage a wide range of behavioral and automated programs across all our member classes."
AutoGrid noted that "unlike other siloed approaches for managing individual demand response programs," the company's DROMS is fully integrated into the utility's infrastructure and is open-standards compliant, "allowing NHEC to scale up and add additional distributed energy resource services in the future from a single, convenient dashboard."