Tendril's Home Analytics Platform Is Positioned to Optimize Customer-Sited DER

Power market stakeholders recognize that residential distributed energy resources (DER) installations can support residential utility customers’ needs while also delivering grid benefits to regional transmission organizations/independent system operators, and local distribution system or network operators (local utilities). New software and hardware platforms that can analyze, control, and optimize the performance of an aggregated network of residential customer-sited DER are being introduced, giving rise to virtual power plants.  

Given this evolution, local utilities are increasingly considering the deployment of distribution management system platforms that can take advantage of aggregated residential DER. Tendril recently announced its new platform, which aims to use the growth of residential customer-sited DER to take further advantage of grid optimization opportunities. 

New Solutions for Utilities and Customers

Tendril’s product approach to date has been to disaggregate residential energy load to create energy usage visibility at the lighting, heating and cooling system, and appliance levels. The company’s Home Energy Analytics platform takes that level of disaggregated load monitoring a step further. Its goal is to create actionable data insights that can support new residential utility customer insights and create opportunities for local utilities to use the effects of these data trends at the distribution system planning level. As a utility-facing, web-based software application, the Home Energy Analytics platform aims to engage with customers and utilities in the following ways: 

• Identify and engage with customers that have inefficient homes, impaired heating or cooling systems, or may be interested in energy efficiency upgrades or new products or programs that could reduce energy use.
• Predict the best location for siting new aggregated DER, like solar, EV, or smart thermostats.

Business models relying on technology platforms that enable DER market participation will create new, higher margin revenue opportunities for energy suppliers—beyond energy sales in competitive energy markets. In regulated retail energy markets, these new DER solutions will allow utilities to take advantage of their relationships with their residential customer base. This should grow revenue beyond traditional retail energy supply and create new solutions that can optimize the local grid. Such issues were examined in the recent Guidehouse Insights report, Maximizing the Residential Energy Customer Experience with Emerging Solutions. Tendril’s Home Energy Analytics platform appears well positioned to bring local utilities, demand-side program managers, and customers together to deploy new solutions to better meet customer, policymaker, and local grid operator needs.