South Africa’s Alstom delivers demand response system for New York

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Alstom has delivered its demand response management system (DRMS) to Con Edison, an electric service provider to 3.3 million customers in New York City and Westchester County, New York. As part of the Smart Grid Demonstration Program funded by the Department of Energy, this project will help Con Edison manage its growing demand response activities and data within a single platform.

The solution, based on Alstom’s e-terraDRBizNet 3.0, provides utilities the digital intelligence to make fast decisions to compensate energy flow and optimize existing assets. It can manage groups of aggregators and their resources, enabling Con Edison to reduce load within targeted overloaded areas.

In addition to automating Con Edison’s processes, Alstom’s DRMS technology also provides the utility with advanced performance and settlement capabilities, measuring groups of aggregator resources’ performance and automatically applying the current tariff rules to calculate the payment for participating load reduction.

“This enables us to move more quickly,” said Andre Wellington, the project manager from Con Edison. “We anticipate fewer outages through increased network reliability and uptimes with DR’s  availability. Additionally, the new demand response portal for enrollment and performance reporting will make it easy for our aggregators and customers to enroll and manage their DR resources, participate in events, and monitor their performance,” Wellington added.

Alstom’s DRMS is a system that integrates residential, commercial and industrial Demand Response programs and device technologies; it can be used from small pilot deployments, such as handling new, initial automated demand response programs, to large industrial-grade DRMS needs, such as efficiently calling on a large complex portfolio of energy resources to address surging demand.

The DRMS from Alstom forecasts available load curtailment capacity and has been deployed with the capability to send signals for automatic load control to aggregators or directly to devices such as air conditioners or water heaters, thus optimizing the use of electricity. It then calculates customers’ normal electricity usage as a baseline, and then compares actual reduced usage to measure performance.