Dive Brief:
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Distributed energy management vendor Tangent Energy Solutions has formed a joint venture with diesel and gas engine manufacturer Cummins.
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The joint venture, Tangent Generation Resources, will sell natural gas engines manufactured by Cummins and equipped with Tangent AMP, Tangent’s distributed energy resource management system (DERMS).
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Tangent Generation Resources says it will work exclusively through municipal utility and energy retailer channel partners to help their commercial and industrial customers dispatch generation during peak demand periods when costs on the energy grid are the highest.
Dive Insight:
Microgrids have many attractions for many businesses and public service entities, but they would still need to justify the costs.
“Customers are getting much smarter in this [distributed generation] space, and they’re looking for revenue assets” as well as backup power, Satish Jayaram, director of Cummins Energy Ventures, told Greentech Media.
In this venture, software will help the energy from the backup generators bid into markets or control the resource as a way to mitigate demand charges Greentech notes. Increasingly, utilities and distributed energy resources are looking to software controls as one way to aggregate and monitor demand response programs and DERs. Using these controls on the customer side for demand charges —which targets their peak usage (usually monthly)—can also lower bills and curtail energy usage.
Using Tangent software, Jayaram said generators would also be able to offer customers more revenue options by being able to dispatch individual units based on a complex set of economic imperatives, such as changes in the expected price of energy, or whether or not a customer is about to exceed peak demand limits.