Every year, the Peak Load Management Alliance (PLMA) recognizes utilities leading the industry with novel and successful approaches to managing DERs. We’re excited to have been recognized with both of this year’s Program Pacesetter Award awards alongside two of our longtime utility partners, Arizona Public Service (APS) and National Grid.This year, PLMA will host a virtual awards ceremony on April 22^nd to honor the winners as part of their virtual spring conference. You can find the agenda for the live ceremony along with the full conference programming, including presentations from EnergyHub customers APS and Eversource, on PLMA’s site. Registration is free to members and non-members alike.

Both APS and National Grid work with EnergyHub to manage DER programs that provide valuable, cost-effective grid services while engaging customers in new ways. Read on for more details on their award-winning programs.

National Grid’s Connected Solutions

National Grid’s ConnectedSolutions program is the nation’s first performance-based residential Bring Your Own Battery demand response program. This is one of the only behind-the-meter battery programs that truly demonstrates the value of a customer-centric approach to grid and flexibility management.

ConnectedSolutions provides battery owners across MA and RI with incentives ranging from $250-400/kW-year in exchange for providing unused capacity to support National Grid’s distribution network objectives. The program embraces consumer choice, enabling participation with energy storage systems from Tesla, Sunrun, Generac Power Systems, SolarEdge, Sonnen, and other energy storage providers through an integration with EnergyHub’s Mercury DERMS platform. The ability of batteries to provide daily, year-round flexibility allows National Grid to call events multiple times a day to manage summer and winter peaks.

APS Rewards Programs and Solar Communities

APS is pioneering a customer-centric approach to managing complexity at the grid edge. The utility faces challenges today that many utilities expect to face in the future: growing peak demand and significant supply of solar generation, resulting in an irregular load curve. The need for load shaping – minimizing seasonal peaks and daily renewable smoothing – turned their attention to DERs at the grid edge.

In response, APS implemented several DER programs that help them address this challenge while also reimagining the relationship between a utility and its customers. They currently use EnergyHub’s Mercury DERMS to manage four successful DER programs:  Cool Rewards (thermostats), Storage Rewards (batteries), Reserve Rewards (water heaters), and Solar Communities (solar inverters).

APS leverages these DERs for peak demand reduction, load shifting and renewables matching, and solar management. These grid services are available year-round, multiple times a day, unlike event-based calls for demand response.

APS has gained unique insights through these programs into how to manage and optimize a diverse set of DERs. A multi-DER portfolio will help APS accomplish their objectives of cost-effective demand response and a more robust grid, in addition to its long-term goal of 100% clean energy by 2050.

Interested to learn more about EnergyHub’s solutions? Download our DERMS factsheet to get the full list of features and capabilities.

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