Jun 22, 2018   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Doosan GridTech and Austin Energy win Grid Edge Innovation Award for Austin SHINES solar + storage project.

Doosan GridTech® and Austin Energy were presented with a Grid Edge Innovation Award for their design of the Austin SHINES project at Greentech Media’s Grid Edge Innovation Summit today. This honor recognizes their advancements in deploying a progressive distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) that will help the Texas utility as well as its customers benefit from a variety of field test DER applications. The award is one of only ten given by Greentech Media to top companies and projects that are driving change in the electricity system.

Over the coming months, Austin Energy and Doosan will test and optimize the effectiveness of Doosan GridTech’s DERMS software -- Distributed Energy Resource Optimizer (DERO®). A variety of distributed energy resources (DER) will connect to this platform, including: two utility-scale storage systems, rooftop and commercial solar installations, customer-owned storage systems, smart inverters, and a variety of other analytical tools. The goal is to learn how to maximize the value of integrating distributed energy resources and enable higher penetrations of solar onto the distribution grid. This will inform best practices for utilities when integrating renewable energy and energy storage on the grid at utility, commercial, and residential scales. This solution could also help the utility to better manage energy loads, improve grid reliability and prepare the city of Austin for its utility’s goal of reaching 65 percent renewable energy generation by the year 2027.

“We are thrilled to be a recipient of this innovation award,” said Debbie Kimberly, Vice President of Customer Energy Solutions and Corporate Communications, Austin Energy. “The amount of collaboration being done with our partners to integrate innovative solutions like Austin SHINES has been very encouraging. This project is paving the way to a more renewable future and providing more value to the community.”

For Austin SHINES, DERs participate in five value-creating use cases through DERO. Three are economic in nature – energy arbitrage, real time price dispatch, and peak load reduction. Two are reliability based – voltage support and congestion management. DERO works to optimize the DER participation across multiple time horizons (e.g., hour-ahead, day-ahead) and changing system conditions (e.g., changing solar production). Schedules are sent to DERs to deliver on the highest value use cases every five minutes. Although the DERs are not actively bidding, DERO can optimize to find the lowest cost dispatch of DERs based on system parameters. DER communication and control take place through open standards based interfaces, improving interoperability across assets and allowing for easy expansion of the fleet in the future.

The Austin SHINES project is funded by the US Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office under its Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV program, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and Austin Energy.

“We are humbled by the recognition, and appreciate the strong partnership with Austin Energy and the funding from DOE to realize this vision,” said Daejin Choi, CEO, Doosan GridTech. “We see utilities as key to realizing the potential of DERs to reduce carbon emissions, maximize the value to serve load, and improve the reliability of the distribution grid. Through this work, we are creating a framework for designing the right combination of hardware with software controls for any utility grappling with the challenge and opportunity of DERs.”

With this recognition, Doosan is the recipient of two Grid Edge awards in three years. Its first award in 2016 was for the firm’s contribution to the advancement of the energy system through the inaugural deployment of its open standards, two-tiered software platform as an energy storage fleet manager for Snohomish County PUD.

About Austin Energy

Austin Energy, the City of Austin’s electric utility, serves more than 475,000 customer accounts and more than one million residents in Greater Austin. The utility’s mission — to safely deliver clean, affordable, reliable energy and excellent customer service — has guided Austin Energy in powering the community and supporting the region’s growth since 1895. As a publicly owned utility, Austin Energy contributes more than $109 million annually to support important City services such as streetlights, parks, libraries and public safety. For more information about Austin Energy, visit austinenergy.com.

About Doosan GridTech®

Doosan GridTech is a global software and solutions provider that helps electric utilities and other megawatt scale power producers to evaluate, procure, integrate and optimize energy storage and other distributed energy resources. The Seattle-based company has managed nearly 85 MW of multiple energy storage and distributed resource integration projects on open standards software platforms across the country and in Southeast Asia. It is ranked as one of the top energy storage solution providers by Navigant Research and Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Its parent company, Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co Ltd, is headquartered in South Korea and is a multinational conglomerate with an emphasis on industrial and infrastructure products and services. www.doosangridtech.com