Late last month, Boston-based smart grid company EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC) revealed that it’s looking to the consumer Internet for a new way of managing its “demand response” pools.
These are the groups of companies and municipalities that, in return for cash payments from EnerNOC, sign up to have their electrical consumption dialed back remotely in times of peak demand. EnerNOC markets the pools to utilities and grid operators as the equivalent of a new generating source (since utilities that tap the pools can avoid building more power plants or turning to expensive “peaking plants” just to fill in during peak hours).
The only problem with EnerNOC’s first-generation demand response network, which it’s been building since 2001, is that it can’t be activated quite as quickly as conditions can change on the electrical grid. Utilities and system operators are used to seeing how much power is available in real time—but EnerNOC’s system pulls information from its 5,000 customer sites at intervals ranging from every 20 seconds to every 5 minutes. To make the demand response pools look and behave more like a conventional supply-side resource, the company needed to get data more frequently.
Via: Making the Smart Grid Smarter Through Instant Messaging
