BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Tendril today announced Orchestrated Energy™, the first cloud software solution enabling utilities and other energy providers to simultaneously optimize system operation and customer comfort. Orchestrated Energy is a Continuous Demand Management (CDM) solution that calculates a home’s thermal mass, predicts consumer behavior and integrates with connected devices, to create a unique dispatch schedule for every home, every day. In pilot programs with some of the largest utilities in North America, Tendril Orchestrated Energy reduced HVAC peak load by up to 50 percent and lowered energy consumption from cooling by up to 20 percent. Orchestrated Energy will soon expand from controlling smart thermostats to co-optimizing other Distributed Energy Resources (DERS), like water heaters, solar systems and electric vehicles, making it the first truly comprehensive home energy management platform.
“The power sector today faces unprecedented challenges in reducing costs and enhancing customer value, while rebuilding its infrastructure and integrating ever cheaper, but highly variable, renewable energy,” said Steve Corneli, Principal of Strategies for Clean Energy Innovation. “Orchestrated Energy is designed to work seamlessly with both utilities and competitive DER service providers, providing the first truly scalable solution to managing residential load in real-time, while dramatically increasing energy efficiency and enhancing the customer’s value proposition. The results – lower power supply costs, better targeted infrastructure investment, more efficient integration of renewables, and happier customers – should be compelling to utilities, competitive energy service providers, and regulators across the country.”
Over the past few years, smart thermostats have become an increasingly important entry point to the connected home. Accenture predicts approximately 55 million smart thermostats will be installed in homes across North America by 2025. Although smart thermostats have been an important breakthrough, significant untapped potential remains. Fully leveraging the capability of smart thermostats – and ultimately other DERS – lies in unlocking the ability to continuously manage demand and to truly optimize energy use in the connected home.
Orchestrated Energy is the only data analytics software solution to provide detailed insight into home characteristics, weather patterns and consumer behaviors. It achieves twice the energy efficiency savings of a smart thermostat alone, delivers three times the peak demand reduction from the HVAC system and creates a path to manage other devices and DERS. As a result, it helps utilities finally deliver truly customer-friendly demand response programs today while preparing for a future characterized by DERS.
ecobee participated in the summer 2016 field trials of Orchestrated Energy. Additional smart thermostat partnerships have been formed with Honeywell and Energate, meaning Orchestrated Energy, a device-agnostic platform, can connect to and control a range of additional devices.
“As Tendril’s pilot smart thermostat partner, we think the peak demand modeling within Orchestrated Energy is a great innovation available to utilities,” said Chris Carradine, Executive Vice President at ecobee. “We are excited to continue to work with companies like Tendril who see the untapped potential that exists in leveraging smart thermostats to maintain grid stability while keeping customers comfortable.”
Introducing Tendril Orchestrated Energy
Tendril Orchestrated Energy is a transformative cloud-based residential Continuous Demand Management (CDM) platform that optimizes consumption, generation and storage to meet customer needs at the lowest cost for the utility. It leverages the company’s TrueHome Simulation Model to truly understand the individual and their home. By collecting and processing 300 data elements on items like the home’s footprint, local weather conditions, and what motivates residents to act, Tendril ensures that energy services are highly personalized. Orchestrated Energy far exceeds any other demand management solution on the market today because it:
- Continuously Optimizes Energy for Every Home – It creates a unique and personalized optimization plan for every home, every day based on building characteristics, local weather patterns, system conditions, and individual needs of the consumer. Other solutions use a basic set of rules or profiles layered on top of a traditional Direct Load Control program mindset – like precooling a home an hour before a load shedding event or assigning each person to 1 of 10 stock demand management schedules.
- Reshapes Demand Without Compromising Comfort – It offers outcome-based customer control with adaptive learning. Customers set their basic preferences and Orchestrated Energy learns additional patterns and tendencies. It then optimizes around the system needs, but without ever violating the customers’ desired comfort range.
- Supports TOU Rates and Enhances Existing DR Investments – It can seamlessly integrate with existing Direct Load Control programs to deliver better savings at a reduced cost, while also establishing happier customers. In addition, Orchestrated Energy can be optimized around different price signals or variables that the utility provides, such as Time of Use (TOU) pricing signals. This approach is differentiated from existing solutions, which only respond to direct commands to shed load.
- Is Future Proof and Device Agnostic – It sits atop an open software platform that can work with any distributed generation, storage or smart energy device in the home (thermostats, water heaters, appliances, pool pumps, solar panels, electric vehicles, storage devices, etc.). It also helps utilities proactively prepare for a range of imminent regulatory challenges: REV-like reforms, net-metering battles, a push toward TOU rates, and rate case pressures.
- Delivers Scalable Orchestration – It scales to manage the entire connected home simultaneously and manages multiple homes to optimize a neighborhood, circuit, region or entire system. It can then be dispatched like a virtual power plant, making it a true utility resource.
- Taps Into the Mobile Revolution – It is offered as a module in Tendril MyHome, the first unified, personalized, mobile-first application for the energy industry. As a result, participating consumers can establish an Energy ID that optimizes recommendations, tracks their savings and shares information that could determine future settings.
“Orchestrated Energy is the final piece of a vision we have been pursuing for more than a decade,” said Adrian Tuck, CEO, Tendril. “We’ve introduced leading solutions that allow our utility partners to provide a seamless multi-channel consumer experience, and now continuously manage demand to both solve today’s network challenges and allow energy providers to play a central role in the connected home. With Orchestrated Energy, we have rationalized the grid edge and made it work for all ecosystem players so the energy industry can define its own future.”
Additional Resources:
About Tendril
Tendril delivers personalized energy experiences for consumers around the world. Pioneering energy providers that want to establish a competitive advantage rely on our software and solutions to better acquire, engage and activate their customers. To do this, we employ the latest in energy science and data analytics to unveil a complete understanding of the individual consumer, including their unique needs and propensities to act. With this granular understanding, we help our customers unlock the true value of energy interactions. For more information, please visit http://www.tendrilinc.com or follow us on Twitter at @Tendril.
