Dive Brief:
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LichtBlick, a German electric retailer focused on providing sustainable energy, plans to expand its offerings of Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) tools into the residential market, including in the United States.
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The company says its DERMS platform already integrates more than 1,000 DERs, including photovoltaics, energy storage batteries, wind power and electric vehicles.
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In Germany LichtBlick says it reached the million-customer mark in 2014 with its SwarmDirigent cloud-based platform for integrating distributed energy resources (DERs).
Dive Insight:
The proliferation of DERs is giving rise to a variety of software solutions for managing those resources. In locations from Austin to Arizona utilities are embracing DERMS systems to better integrate their changing generation mix and optimize the resources on their grids.
The U.S. market is also an attractive market for foreign companies, particularly companies in Europe that have a track record in dealing with high levels of renewable resource penetration.
Some of those companies, such as sonnen of Germany, are working to introduce digitally connected DERs that can form miniature grids that aggregate solar and storage users into communities that can be managed as a single system. Others, such as Siemens and RWE, have teamed up to develop virtual power plants.
The latest seeking to enter the U.S. DERMS market is LichtBlick of Germany. The company says its cloud-based IT platform for integrating DERs, SwarmDirigent, allows operators to balance various DERs within their networks, meaning it can integrate storage-specific applications such as peak shaving, solar load shifting as well as grid-balancing.
The company has expanded into markets in Vietnam and the Philippines, and is now looking at expanding further in the European Union and into the United States and Oceania.
"We are experiencing a radical change of the global energy system,” LichtBlick CEO Heiko von Tschischwitz, said in media reports. “Energy is becoming distributed and digital. This is the market opportunity we are seizing.”
As it expands its DERMS offerings in the U.S. and elsewhere, von Tschischwitz told PV Magazine that its next focus will be allowing households and businesses with their own distributed generation to market it to other customers via its software platform. The CEO said the offerings will be “in line with Airbnb or Uber for electricity" and could eventually allow for peer-to-peer energy sharing platform between customers.