US energy aggregators tout milestones in helping utilities achieve flexible load

EnergyHub says it is the first DERMS provider to exceed one million devices under management. Uplight says its enrollment increased 150% in 2022 over 2021.

Aggregated Distributed Energy Resources (DER), including battery storage, electric vehicles, smart appliances, water heaters and smart thermostats, are increasingly being used by utilities to achieve load control on the grid. Two DER aggregator companies in late April announced milestone achievements in their enrolled devices.

EnergyHub

EnergyHub said it is now the first Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS) provider to have more than one million DERs under management. The company works with more than 60 utilities across North America and hundreds of device partners to support DER-based Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), it said in a press release.

“These devices collectively deliver 1.35GW of flexibility across North America’s electrical grid, which is more than the generation capacity of a medium-sized nuclear power plant,” said EnergyHub CEO Seth Frader-Thompson. “One million devices is a key achievement in our mission to help utilities and their customers in their quest for a carbon-free, distributed energy future.”

Maintaining reliable energy service has grown more challenging as the country navigates extreme weather and heavier demand for electricity, but utilities are adapting by using the rapidly growing number of customer-owned DERs on the grid as flexible resources. In 2022, the number of EVs participating in EnergyHub programs increased more than 200 percent and the number of batteries increased more than 80 percent year-over-year. The exponential growth of connected DERs promises much-needed load flexibility as more renewables come online—but only if utilities can harness that flexibility when and where they need it with reliable VPPs.

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EnergyHub partners with some of the largest utilities in North America, including Arizona Public Service (APS), DTE Energy, National Grid, Salt River Project (SRP), and others, deploying unique, customer-centric support services to scale client programs.

“Over the past five years, we’ve partnered with EnergyHub to build our Cool Rewards program into a key part of APS’s flexibility strategy,” said Kerri Carnes, director of customer to grid solutions at APS. “We can now call on more than 75,000 enrolled thermostats delivering 110MW of reliable flexibility, helping us shift energy demand and incorporate more renewable power onto our smart grid.”

For the US to achieve 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, between one and two terawatts (TW) of power generation must be decarbonised. That transformation will only be possible when massive flexibility—on the order of 500GW—is available to match demand to the variable nature of renewables, said the company.

Uplight

Uplight announced on April 26 that it has reached more than 330,000 grid-connected devices under management — a milestone enabling utilities to scale their decarbonisation journeys and better engage with customers to deliver more affordable, more reliable and cleaner energy.

The company enrolled more than 3,000 devices per week in the second half of 2022, a 150% increase compared to 2021. This is the equivalent of 50MW of incremental flexible load, or one fewer peaker plant, every four months, it said.

The enrollment achievement comes two years after receiving a strategic investment from a consortium of investors and as the company continues to scale and solidify its performance for its utility clients. Uplight launched 34 client projects in 2022, all while achieving a 40% efficiency gain in speed to launch.

Uplight said it responded to a record number of demand response events in 2022, shifting an estimated 766MW of energy to save consumers money while avoiding the use of peaker plants.

Uplight said it added functionality to its unified data platform in 2022, including data ingest traceability, externalisation capabilities and error reporting. With these improvements, the platform is ready to scale by orders of magnitude, it said. Three new insights APIs were also added to Uplight’s developer platform, allowing utilities and ecosystem partners to more easily create or enhance digital experiences to drive enrollments into load flexibility and decarbonization programs.