Eneco Partners With AutoGrid to Deploy Industry's First Software Defined Power Plant to Integrate Renewable Energy Into the Dutch Electric Grid

AutoGrid Systems, a leader in big data analytics for the electricity and energy industry, today announced that Eneco Group, the leading Dutch sustainable energy group dedicated to helping its clients to save, use, exchange or sell energy, which serves more than 2 million residential and business users, has selected its Predictive Controls™ technology and its flagship application, DROMS, to build and deploy the industry's first Software Defined Power Plant™. This solution enables Eneco to monetize and trade flexibility associated with all types of customer owned distributed energy resources, in real-time, in wholesale electricity markets.

Eneco's Software Defined Power Plant, built on AutoGrid's breakthrough Predictive Controls technology platform, provides Eneco with the ability to forecast, optimize and control a vast network of distributed energy resources in real-time and at scale. Eneco's Software Defined Power Plant integrates flexibility from customer-owned Combined Heat and Power (CHP) units in greenhouses, industrial demand response, and other flexible distributed energy resources into a single, reliable resource. With this 100 megawatt (MW) dispatch-grade resource, Eneco can react in real-time to market signals from Dutch wholesale electricity markets run by the Dutch Transmission System Operator (TSO), optimize a large portfolio of distributed generation assets and trade in these markets 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. This capability allows Eneco to integrate more renewable energy resources into its generation portfolio and reduce imbalance costs associated with renewable intermittency, helping it to cost-effectively reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

"Environmental sustainability is at the core of the strategy of Eneco Group, and cost-effective integration of renewable and other distributed resources into our energy portfolio is one of the main ways we seek to realize this goal," said Michel Engelen, Head of Portfolio Management from Eneco. "By offering us increased control over our flexible portfolio, AutoGrid's Software Defined Power Plant enables us to integrate alternative flexible energy resources into our portfolio and subsequently a larger amount of intermittent renewables, helping our customers reduce their energy costs and helping us get a higher return on our renewable assets."

"We are delighted to have been selected by Eneco, one of Europe's most respected leaders in the energy industry, to power this cutting edge and technologically challenging project," said Dr. Amit Narayan, CEO of AutoGrid. "We believe that big data-driven applications will enable energy leaders to discover new sources of revenue and innovative ways to engage with their end customers in the highly competitive European market."