DERMS, Customer Engagement, & Forecasting Suites Provide Unified, End-to-End DER Approach for Modern Utilities

Louisville, KY – Virtual Peaker, a cloud-based SaaS company that empowers modern utilities with the friendliest distributed energy platform on the planet, has expanded its platform to include Customer Engagement and Forecasting suites of products in addition to its leading DERMS suite. This suites-based approach allows utilities to customize and scale their SaaS solutions to gain greater value from distributed energy resources. 

Virtual Peaker is known as an international leader creating distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS) that help utilities seamlessly manage their distributed energy resources, including rooftop solar, wind, residential battery storage, and electric vehicles (EVs). As these renewable sources become more common, utilities are increasingly seeing the value of utilizing software that can manage and unify the end-to-end lifecycle of these DERs.  

“The energy industry is constantly changing and evolving, so utilities are searching for software options among a plethora of complex and disparate choices. Virtual Peaker’s new product suite approach highlights the surge we’re experiencing with utilities that see DERMS as critical to their success, but also understand that they need a scalable and unified solution to manage all aspects of DER program management,” said William (Bill) Burke, the founder, and CEO of Virtual Peaker. “We expect that the transition to suites will dramatically impact how our utility clients scale and manage their DER programs to deliver renewable energy that ultimately leads to a more sustainable planet.”

The three core suites are grouped thematically into independent stacks, each with a base set of functionality plus additional services loaded on top. This allows DERMS to be decoupled from the other functions and offers tiered levels (e.g., Basic, Professional, and Enterprise. Virtual Peaker’s three suites are:

• Shift, the DERMS Suite – Device Enrollment and Control, Baselining, Time-of-Use (TOU) Optimization (and coming soon!) virtual power plants (VPP)
• Relay, the Customer Engagement Suite – Seamless customer engagement features to drive program enrollment and adoption
• Envision, the Forecasting Suite – Load forecasting made easy with custom reporting, predictive, and real-time data.

Utilities including CoServ, the second-largest electric cooperative in Texas, already are gravitating to Virtual Peaker’s flexible, scalable suites-based approach.

CLICK HERE to read the full press release.

Shifted Energy (Shifted) is a venture funded, Hawaii-based technology startup working to advance renewable energy integration by managing behind the meter energy loads such as water heaters, thermostats, and EV chargers. Shiftedʻs platform, Grid Maestro, aggregates Internet connected controllers using patent pending software to provide advanced energy management services to electrical grid operators. Shifted operates projects in Hawaii, multiple U.S. cities, and several countries. Shifted operates in the fast growing Demand Response industry providing modern energy services that will be required on nearly every electrical grid worldwide.

This position will lead core parts of Shiftedʻs cloud applications in AWS. Shifted's systems, Grid Maestro, manages large data sets and comprises multiple applications that manage these data sets for use in the Demand Response industry. This includes machine learning based forecasting, advanced analytics such as leak detection from electrical telemetry, custom control strategies that balance end user comfort with maximum energy shifting potential, renewable energy optimization such as managing loads to optimally coincide with available wind resources, and API integrations with a large number of partners. Shiftedʻs stack is a modern AWS Serverless system.

Ideal Qualifications:

• 1-2 years of experience implementing and administering AWS serverless and non-serverless services including Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, EC2, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, and CloudFormation, StepFunctions, Infrastructure as Code (SAM), etc.
• Hands-on experience implementing monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and metrics reporting.
• Experienced in support processes, runbook management, adhering to SLA's, and issue resolution/management.
• Demonstrate a strong understanding of Computer Science fundamentals in data structures, OS, Networking, problem solving, and performance tuning.
• Experience with one or more scripting languages like Python, Bash/Shell, or PowerShell. NodeJS is a plus. Experience with Git/GitHub required.
• OpenAPI Specification experience
• Docker / Container experience
• Data Science / Machine Learning fundamental knowledge is a plus
• Strong technical documentation skills.
• Evaluate new application, infrastructure and cloud decisions in an existing context of applications, infrastructure, standards, current business strategy and future business strategy.
• Able to work around changing product requirements
• Ensure security is integrated into all architecture solutions.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, team-oriented environment with minimal supervision.
• Participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation.
• AWS Solutions Architect - Associate Certification or equivalent

CLICK HERE to read the full job description and apply.

Modesto Irrigation District, a publicly owned electric utility in Modesto, California, has published an RFP for a Demand Response Smart Thermostat Program.  MID is seeking proposals from vendors in the demand response industry that can offer a turnkey demand response smart thermostat program, with services that include the design of the program, incentive management, customer verification and enrollment, event dispatch, and post-event reporting and validation.

The following link has the RFP location on the MID website:

https://www.mid.org/about/do-business-with-mid/rfp/demand-smart-thermostat-rfp/

Responses are due by February 24, 2022, sent to the following email address: [email protected]

We’re excited to announce that we’re continuing to expand our offerings through the acquisition of AAC Utility Partners.

AAC is a vendor-independent consulting firm providing services exclusively to utilities for the transformation of customer information systems and other critical operational systems. AAC assists clients in the areas of strategic software assessment, selection, project implementation, and cloud consulting.

“There is no substitute for AAC’s proven expertise and track record of success in implementing large technology projects that are foundational to becoming a modern, digital utility,” says E Source CEO Ted Schultz. “When combined with E Source’s technology planning and implementation capabilities supporting AMI and GIS, plus our ability to make data useful using our research and predictive data science products, the addition of AAC further enhances our ability to drive value for our utility clients by delivering what’s next.”

AAC is the eighth company we’ve as acquired in the past 24 months. The acquisition is an important step in our continued effort to build a comprehensive, tech-enabled, customer-first portfolio of digital, data-driven solutions that help utilities manage their rapidly evolving customer, infrastructure, and business needs.

Since 2005, AAC has guided electric, gas, water, wastewater, and multiservice utilities across North America through successful technology projects. AAC’s client base ranges from municipal utilities to investor-owned utilities with seven-figure customer counts.

“AAC Utility Partners developed the award-winning, NavigateOne methodology and tools because utilities needed superior processes to find success with their technology projects,” says Edwin Crow, managing partner of AAC. “Over the years, we’ve had the pleasure of completing over 75 fully functional projects. By joining the E Source team, we’ll be able to bring our capabilities to more utilities to help them become technology leaders.”

“This acquisition brings to life an important connection from hardware to software to predictive data science,” says Rob Langley, managing partner and cofounder of Align Capital Partners, which owns E Source. “This powerful combination offers utilities a partner that can connect the dots like no other.”

CLICK HERE to read the press release.