National Grid Selects AutoGrid Flex to Unify Flexibility Management Programs Across New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwired - May 10, 2017) -  National Grid, a leading electricity and natural gas company serving over 7 million customers across New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, announced that it has selected AutoGrid, a leader in flexibility management software, to unify management of its demand response (DR) and distributed energy resource (DER) programs across its service area in North America. The programs are expected to enroll over 400 megawatts (MW) of DR and other DERs over a 3-year timeframe. These programs will deliver significant cost savings to participating businesses while helping National Grid reduce operational expenses and investments in transmission and distribution infrastructure, which will lower costs for all National Grid customers.

National Grid plans to implement five programs in the first year of operation across its entire service territory. These include the New York Emergency DR Program (EDRP), the New York Distribution Load Relief Program (DLRP), the New York Commercial System Relief Program (CSRP), the Massachusetts Connected Solutions Program, and the Rhode Island Connected Solutions Program. Eligible commercial and industrial customers can enroll in the program through vendors such as EnerNOC, CPower, NRG, IP Keys, and Direct Energy.

National Grid will use AutoGrid Flex™ to unify management of these programs across all customers through a single dashboard, using it for event dispatch, measurement and verification, and reporting for all customers. In addition, the aggregators participating in the program will be able to manage their participation through AutoGrid Engage™, AutoGrid's multi-tenant customer engagement application. In subsequent years, National Grid may expand the use of AutoGrid Flex for other non-wires alternative initiatives. These include innovative new programs that optimize customer-sited energy storage systems, solar power systems, EV chargers, industrial control equipment, and other DERs, providing National Grid with yet another source of flexible capacity to balance supply and demand on the grid.

"AutoGrid Flex will help us deliver innovative flexibility management programs to our business customers, enabling them to reduce their energy costs and meet their sustainability goals," said Carlos Nouel, Vice President of New Energy Solutions, National Grid. "We look forward to leveraging AutoGrid Flex's powerful optimization capabilities to improve the reliability of our operations and to support initiatives that not only deliver savings to our customers but reimagine how we engage with our customers."

National Grid customers who are interested in participating in DR programs can learn more here: http://ngrid.com/demandresponse.

"National Grid has been a leader in developing innovative new business models that address today's most urgent energy challenges, and we are excited to serve as their technology provider on this ambitious initiative to manage distributed energy resources at the grid edge," said Dr. Amit Narayan, CEO of AutoGrid. "By unifying management of these flexibility management programs, National Grid is demonstrating how utilities of the future will use flexibility management to deliver value to their customers and succeed in the new distributed energy world."

Using Flexibility Management to Win in a Distributed Energy World
AutoGrid Flex and AutoGrid Engage enable utilities, electricity retailers, and other energy service providers to manage a diverse set of distributed energy resources across all customer and program types, helping them launch new services that reduce costs, increase revenues, improve customer engagement, and enhance system reliability.

AutoGrid Flex includes four flexibility management modules -- AutoGrid DROMS™, AutoGrid DERMS™ AutoGrid VPP™, and AutoGrid ESMS™ -- that all run on a unified platform that uses AutoGrid's Predictive Controls™ technology to provide energy service providers with a comprehensive flexibility management solution for all types of DERs such as battery storage, EV chargers, thermostats, load control switches, pool-pumps, water heaters, co-generation units, backup generators, and industrial demand response.

AutoGrid Engage is a residential, commercial and industrial customer engagement application that incorporates AutoGrid's advanced analytics and big data processing capabilities to provide relevant and personalized pricing and DER offers to residential, commercial and industrial customers, deliver real-time optimization to increase customer savings and program participation.

Using AutoGrid Flex and AutoGrid Engage, energy companies can differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive new energy world by offering highly personalized flexibility management programs to all their customers. Energy consumers can get significant savings in an automated and convenient manner from their trusted energy provider.

By utilizing the unified AutoGrid Flex application to implement their entire flexibility management roadmap, energy companies gain significant time-to-market and cost advantages over the alternative of trying to implement a hodge-podge of point solutions that require expensive and time consuming work to integrate with their complex backend systems and operational processes. AutoGrid Flex's powerful portfolio optimization capabilities allow energy companies to optimize their entire DER portfolio across all programs in real-time, and at scale, significantly boosting their portfolio's return on investment.

About National Grid:
National Grid (LSE: NG) (NYSE: NGG) is an electricity and natural gas delivery company that connects nearly 7 million customers to vital energy sources through its networks in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It is the largest distributor of natural gas in the Northeast. National Grid also operates the systems that deliver gas and electricity across Great Britain. Through its U.S. Connect21 strategy, National Grid is transforming its electricity and natural gas networks to support the 21st century digital economy with smarter, cleaner, and more resilient energy solutions. Connect21 is vital to our communities' long-term economic and environmental health and aligns with regulatory initiatives in New York (REV: Reforming the Energy Vision) and Massachusetts (Grid Modernization). For more information please visit our website, or our Connecting website, follow us on Twitter, watch us on YouTube, friend us on Facebook, find our photos on Instagram.

About AutoGrid:
AutoGrid builds software applications that enable a smarter Energy Internet. The company's AutoGrid Flex™ suite of Energy Internet applications allows utilities, electricity retailers, renewable energy project developers and energy service providers to deliver cheap, clean and reliable energy by managing networked distributed energy resources (DERs) in real time and at scale. AutoGrid applications are all built on the AutoGrid Energy Internet Platform™ (EIP™), with patented Predictive Controls™ technology that leverages petabytes of smart meter, sensor and third-party data, along with powerful data science and high-performance computing algorithms, to monitor, predict, optimize and control the operations of millions of assets connected across global energy networks.

AutoGrid Flex has more than 2,000 megawatts of DERs under contract with more than 25 global energy companies around the world. Several of the world's leading energy companies, such as E.ON, Bonneville Power Administration, Florida Power & Light, Southern California Edison, Eneco, Portland General Electric, CPS Energy, New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, NextEra Energy, Xcel Energy and CLEAResult, are using AutoGrid's software to improve their operations, integrate renewables and drive deeper engagement with their customers. AutoGrid has been recognized with several prestigious industry awards including the 2016 Energy Productivity Innovation Challenge (EPIC), Greentech Media's Grid Edge Award 2016, Bloomberg New Energy Pioneer 2016, World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2015, Red Herring Top 100 North America 2015, 2017 Cleantech Global 100, and Industrial Innovation Company of the Year 2014 by the Cleantech Group.