AutoGrid Teams with Japanese Energy Services and Trading Company to Develop World’s Largest Energy Storage-Based Virtual Power Plant (VPP)
REDWOOD CITY, CA. – June 17, 2019 – AutoGrid, the leader in flexibility management software for the energy industry, announced today its latest project in Japan, which will be the largest storage-virtual power plant (VPP) in the world by asset volume. The project anticipates adding more than 10,000 assets to the VPP between 2020-2021, with rapid scaling in subsequent years.
Under the partnership, AutoGrid will supply Japanese energy services and trading company ENERES Co., Ltd. with VPP and customer engagement software to aggregate, dispatch and market energy from demand response (DR) and distributed energy resources (DERs).
The partnership will enable ENERES to combine DR resources into large enough blocks of energy to sell into capacity markets. The first phase of the project begins later this year and will result in a large, dispatchable DR portfolio.
A second phase will enable ENERES to deploy a full-scale VPP to aggregate behind-the-meter DERs, including solar photovoltaic panels, energy storage systems, combined heat and power (CHP) units, and electric vehicle batteries, along with DR. Using the AutoGrid Flex™ platform, ENERES will pool DERs from its customers into a dispatchable virtual resource to participate in Japanese wholesale energy and capacity markets.
“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,” said Masahiro Kobayashi, President & 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.”
AutoGrid will supply a custom-branded, cloud-based software solution that will allow ENERES to manage all aspects of the VPP, including program configuration, customer enrollment, monitoring and forecasting, event dispatch, event notifications, and measurement and verification (M&V). ENERES will use the AutoGrid Flex™ platform for AI-driven DER management, and it will use AutoGrid Engage™ to support customer marketing, signup and participation.
“Japan is in the midst of a massive market transformation that requires much greater supplies of flexible energy,” said Dr. Amit Narayan, Chief Executive Officer of AutoGrid. “We’re excited to team with ENERES to provide a scalable platform to meet this critical challenge.”
The AutoGrid-ENERES agreement reflects AutoGrid’s strategic intent to scale its presence in Japan and other international markets. Japan’s energy market reforms continue to drive substantial changes in regulation. In March of this year, feed-in tariff (FiT) for Japan’s commercial and industrial solar segment was cut by 22%, with the expectation that the residential sector will follow suit after the 2020 review. AutoGrid’s activity in Japan has increased as the new energy market’s generation targets have driven rapid adoption of storage and as the industry races to integrate more renewable and storage into the mix to achieve 2030 goals.
About ENERES:
ENERES was established in December 2004 as a founding business for supply and demand management of new power. In December 2018, ENERES became a subsidiary of KDDI Corporation and is an affiliate of Power Development Co., Ltd. ENERES will develop an “Energy as a Service” model that optimizes power for corporate power users, utilizing AI-driven management of distributed energy resources, including weather driven demand and power forecasting. www.eneres.co.jp
About AutoGrid:
AutoGrid builds software applications that enable a smarter distributed energy world. The company’s suite of flexibility management applications allows energy companies to deliver clean, affordable and reliable energy by managing networked distributed energy resources (DERs) in real time and at scale. AutoGrid has contracted more than 5,000 megawatts of DERs and works with more than 50 leading energy companies around the world, including CLP Holdings, TotalEnergies SA, National Grid, CPS Energy, NextEra Energy, Schneider Electric and Xcel Energy.
Media Contacts:
ENERES Public Relations Department
pr@eneres.co.jp
Rich Miller for AutoGrid
rich.miller@auto-grid.com
