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Improving Demand Response Programs and Power Loss Detection to Minimize Disruptions and Increase Reliability

In order to maintain enough power generation capability to serve the energy needs of all customers, particularly during the hottest summer days and coldest winter days, many utilities offer innovative energy efficiency and Demand Response (DR) programs to help customers use energy more wisely.

Customers who subscribe to these DR programs commit to reducing power consumption in peak hours for a financial incentive and lower electric bills. While helping customers reduce costs, these programs can decrease peak demand for electricity by thousands of MW and help eliminate the need to build costly peak generation plants. Many utilities are continuously looking for ways to improve their DR programs so they can increase grid reliability, keep costs down for consumers and generate new sources of revenue.

The introduction and rapid growth of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) that can contribute to available energy on the grid, adds an additional dimension that needs to be factored in when making load reduction decisions.

Balancing the load
Trilliant provides solutions that enable utilities to lower peak demands by enlisting and empowering customers to play a role in conserving and reducing the costs of energy. Our continued deep collaboration with utility customers — from helping them understand best practices for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), to planning for the future ­­— enables us to provide a DR platform that leads the industry and enables their energy transition. In fact, we work closely with utilities around the world to collaborate and offer solutions that address their specific needs. Most recently, we worked with an energy provider in the U.S. to ­integrate and enhance their DR schemes among their regional utilities. In this case, our application helps the provider track in near real-time the power consumption of customers, as well as their DERs.

Our DR solution, part of our Prime Energy Suite, is a highly scalable and configurable software designed for utilities. In addition to DR, our platform encompasses meter data collection, alarms and notifications, energy balances, demand response, data management and outage monitoring.

Here are just a few of the benefits and capabilities Prime Energy Suite offers:

  • It monitors energy assets to provide the utility with the knowledge of how much load is at their disposal, and provides direct control of those assets.
  • It enables the aggregation of DERs, such as solar panels or energy assets that export power into the energy distribution grid, to balance and optimize the energy on the grid.
  • Our industry leading vendor agnostic data collection engine supports over 300 residential, commercial and industrial meter models and is able to collect data from smart meters on-site or remotely.
  • Through an easy-to-use web portal, utilities can track consumer energy usage, evaluate requirements and perform measurement management ­­— making decisions based on accurate data.

Monitoring to ensure timely action
While DR and DERs are beneficial for utilities and their customers and help increase reliability and balance the load of the grid, power loss is still a possibility ­— and energy providers need to be prepared.

As part of our extensive suite of offerings, we work with utilities to enhance power loss detection capabilities, providing advanced insights before outages happen. This proactive approach has helped reduce response times significantly and has minimized disruptions across critical infrastructures, including airports and hospitals.

In the case of the U.S. utility mentioned above, our Power Loss Detection tool helps identify and validate when there are incidents corresponding to low voltages and partial or total outages. It provides timely notifications to the utility to ensure any issue that is detected can be addressed as soon as possible. Our dashboard provides insights related to alarms and blackouts present in the meters so utilities can continuously monitor a situation and manage any incidents proactively.

Success with the right technology provider
While it’s impossible to predict the future, it’s important to work with a trusted advisor who can help you be as preventative as possible. When it comes to managing the grid and supporting homeowners and businesses to make better decisions about their energy consumption, there are many factors and considerations. Additionally, every utility is in a unique position; some are further along with their AMI journey, for example. Each utility has specific requirements and distinct issues they are planning to address.

Trilliant is proud of the way we work with electric, gas and water utilities to support them with tailored, device-agnostic solutions to address not only their current needs, but also their requirements for the future ­­— no matter what that might look like.

Learn more about Prime Energy Suite, our industry-leading platform, or reach out to us with any questions about how leveraging data and the right tools can improve your operations.

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Greg Myers is Vice President, Global Product Management at Trilliant