AutoGrid has expanded its partnership with Puget Sound Energy (PSE), Washington state’s largest utility, on a virtual power plant (VPP) solution built on the AutoGrid Flex platform.
PSE and AutoGrid began working together on a VPP in 2021 to provide a centralized application for enrolling, dispatching and assessing the performance of individual and combined programs across PSE’s portfolio. The partnership is now expanding to provide aggregation monitoring, reporting and customer management for all participating programs, empowering PSE to enhance grid reliability and achieve its goals of decarbonization.
The complexity of managing the energy grid through the clean energy transition involves balancing renewables with reliability and ensuring a stable energy supply even in the face of varying conditions.
The AutoGrid Flex platform manages over 8 GW of virtual power plants in nine countries. With the advanced demand response and DER management capabilities provided by AutoGrid Flex and its network of OEM partners and aggregators, PSE will be able to dispatch sufficient capacity to mitigate system peaks in both summer and winter seasons.
PSE’s VPP aims at reducing costs while maintaining reliable energy supply to its more than 1 million residential and business customers. Additionally, the VPP solution allows participating customers to receive monetary incentives for sharing assets with the grid and/or curtailing usage, helping the utility efficiently manage increasing electricity demand.
“This is an exciting partnership for PSE as we work toward our renewable energy goals while maintaining safe, reliable energy for our customers,” says PSE’s Aaron August. “With AutoGrid, we’ll be able to engage our customers like never before to use energy as efficiently as possible, because the cleanest form of energy is the energy you don’t use.”
“AutoGrid is honored to join forces with PSE to demonstrate the power of harnessing distributed energy resources to create a clean, more resilient, and cost-effective grid,” adds AutoGrid CEO Ruben Llanes. “Our partnership will not only help PSE achieve its goals but set a standard to collectively accelerate progress toward a sustainable energy future.”
