AutoGrid and Puget Sound Energy Combat Climate Change with Virtual Power Plants

Collaboration enables Washington state's largest utility provider to advance grid reliability, decarbonization goals

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Nov. 13, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- AutoGrid, the industry leader in harnessing distributed energy resources (DERs) for flexible capacity, today announced an expanded 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.

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. 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 will reduce costs and help maintain 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, something that's financially beneficial for the community as well as 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," said Aaron August, senior vice president, chief customer and transformation officer at PSE. "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," said Ruben Llanes, CEO, AutoGrid. "Our partnership will not only help PSE achieve its goals but set a standard to collectively accelerate progress toward a sustainable energy future."

About AutoGrid
Founded in 2010, AutoGrid is committed to accelerating access to sustainable energy to combat climate change. AutoGrid's artificial intelligence-driven software makes electric vehicles, batteries, roof-top solar, utility-scale wind, and other distributed energy resources (DERs) smarter. By enabling prediction, optimization, and real-time control of millions of energy assets at an unprecedented scale, AutoGrid is making the vision of a decentralized, decarbonized, and democratized new energy world a reality. With over a decade of pioneering experience across the globe, AutoGrid offers fleet owners, energy-as-a-service companies, renewable project developers, utilities, and electricity retailers the ability to build, own, operate, and participate in intelligent and scalable virtual power plants, enabling them to disrupt the dependency on fossil-fuel based energy. The AutoGrid AutoGrid Flex™ platform manages over 8 GW of virtual power plants in 9 countries.

For more information on AutoGrid please visit: https://www.auto-grid.com/

About Puget Sound Energy
Puget Sound Energy is proud to serve our neighbors and communities in 10 Washington counties. We're the state's largest utility, supporting approximately 1.2 million electric customers and 900,000 natural gas customers. We aspire to be a beyond net zero carbon energy company by 2045. For more about us and what we do, visit pse.com. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Media Contact
John Perry
VP of Marketing and Communications, AutoGrid
media@auto-grid.com

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SOURCE AutoGrid