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/PRNewswire/ Amperon Holdings, Inc., the leader in AI-powered grid forecasts, today announced $7 million in Series A funding led by HSBC Asset Management. ....
“Disappointing.” That’s how a range of clean energy advocates and demand response providers are describing the California Public Utilities Commission’s latest plan to prevent a repeat of the state’s August 2020 rolling blackouts this coming summer. The proposed decision (PDF) released last week expands demand-side programs to boost grid reliability. But it doesn’t include any of the proposals that demand response and distributed energy resources providers including Tesla, OhmConnect, Leap, Enel X, CPower and Google Nest have testified could expand capacity quickly enough to meet potential shortfalls this year. The proposal’s primary innovation, an Emergency Load Reduction Program that would pay customers to cut power use during grid emergencies above and beyond their existing demand-response commitments, offers lucrative incentives. But it lacks upfront payments and clarity on how it will credit participants, which demand response providers say could l ....
The business of demand response cutting energy use to reduce peak grid demands has evolved with the growing capability of technologies to enable it over the decades, from the manual emergency load-shedding of the past to the modern incarnation of virtual power plants, which coordinate digitally connected devices to shift loads across thousands of sites in close to real time. But the structures for valuing the “negawatts” that demand response delivers have largely remained the same. One is utility programs that pay customers ahead of time to reduce load under preset conditions and with preset payments, with little flexibility outside the program rules. ....