REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 11, 2017) - Peak Load Management Alliance (PLMA) , the industry's leading consortium of demand response practitioners and experts, announced today at the 35 th PLMA conference that it has selected Portland General Electric (PGE) and AutoGrid Pricing and Behavioral Demand Response Pilot Program for its Program Pacesetter Award.
In this initiative, PGE is simultaneously deploying and evaluating the relative effectiveness of 12 distinct behavioral demand response (BDR), time of use (TOU) pricing and peak time rebate (PTR) test programs by analyzing the potential effectiveness of each program for more than 300,000 residential customers. In its first year, the project has enrolled more than 10,000 residential customers and is testing a number of mechanisms to reduce peak demand during both the winter and summer peak periods. By helping lower electricity demand during peak periods, the pilots will reduce PGE's peak electricity costs, providing savings that it will then pass to its customers.
The project uses AutoGrid Flex™ and AutoGrid Engage™ , AutoGrid's integrated flexibility management applications, to analyze more than 200 million daily load profiles with 15-minute interval data to identify and offer personalized offerings that help maximize individual customer savings.
Assisted by CLEAResult , an energy efficiency and demand response consultancy, PGE is determining which test programs and pricing structures are most effective at engaging customers and delivering reliable load sheds. During the summer and winter of 2016, PGE deployed 14 demand response (DR) events that achieved an average of 1.1 megawatts (MW) of load shed per event across all 12 programs. The results of this pilot will be used to extend the most effective programs to all qualified customers in 2019.
"We are excited about this award as it recognizes PGE's use of innovative technologies to optimize demand response programs that can deliver more value to our customers," said Josh Keeling, Demand-Side Resource Development Lead at PGE. "For example, we found out that the simpler the pricing structure, the more engaged our customers are. These and other insights are helping us determine which pricing structures and other program design elements are most effective in increasing program participation, which will lead to greater cost savings for a larger number of our customers."
PGE used AutoGrid Flex's predictive controls platform to run "Rate Compare" analyses for approximately 300,000 retail customers across multiple rate structures to evaluate several different program design options. The results helped create highly personalized offerings for the customers, enabling PGE to maximize individual customers' potential savings.
AutoGrid Flex also allowed PGE to test several event notification periods. Reminder notifications that were delivered the day of an event, rather than 24 hours before the event, saw up to 50 percent increase in open rates. This and other insights are helping PGE discover new ways to increase program participation rates. To further increase engagement, PGE used AutoGrid Engage to deliver personalized peak savings reports to each of the program participants 24 to 48 hours after each DR event. While the pilot program is still running, the early results are already informing PGE's decisions regarding the design of future programs.
"We are delighted by the early success of this project to deliver new and improved offerings that help residential customers lower their cost of electricity," said Amit Narayan, CEO, AutoGrid. "With flexibility management, utilities have a powerful new tool to turn the challenges arising from the proliferation of DERs and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) into opportunities, helping them serve their customers in new and differentiated ways."
About Portland General Electric Company:
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About PLMA: PLMA (Peak Load Management Alliance) is a non-profit organization founded in 1999 as the Voice of Demand Response Practitioners. PLMA's over 130 member organizations share expertise to educate each other and explore innovative approaches to demand response programs, price and rate response, regional regulatory issues, and technologies as the energy markets evolve represent a broad range of energy professionals. Learn more at www.peakload.org .
About AutoGrid: AutoGrid builds software applications that enable a smarter Energy Internet. The company's AutoGrid Flex™ suite of Energy Internet applications allows utilities, electricity retailers, renewable energy project developers and energy service providers to deliver cheap, clean and reliable energy by managing networked distributed energy resources (DERs) in real time and at scale. AutoGrid applications are all built on the AutoGrid Energy Internet Platform™ (EIP™), with patented Predictive Controls™ technology that leverages petabytes of smart meter, sensor and third-party data, along with powerful data science and high-performance computing algorithms, to monitor, predict, optimize and control the operations of millions of assets connected across global energy networks.
AutoGrid Flex has more than 2,000 megawatts of DERs under contract with more than 25 global energy companies around the world. Several of the world's leading energy companies, such as E.ON, Bonneville Power Administration, Florida Power & Light, Southern California Edison, Eneco, Portland General Electric, CPS Energy, New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, NextEra Energy, Xcel Energy and CLEAResult, are using AutoGrid's software to improve their operations, integrate renewables and drive deeper engagement with their customers. AutoGrid has been recognized with several prestigious industry awards including the 2016 Energy Productivity Innovation Challenge (EPIC), Greentech Media's Grid Edge Award 2016, Bloomberg New Energy Pioneer 2016, World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2015, Red Herring Top 100 North America 2015, 2017 Cleantech Global 100, and Industrial Innovation Company of the Year 2014 by the Cleantech Group.
