- The collaboration plans to engage residential, commercial and industrial customers in Mumbai to achieve 75 MW of peak capacity reduction in six months
- Huge opportunity to harness demand side flexibility & strengthen the grid in India, but the lack of a scalable program acted as a hindrance: Tata Power
India’s premier integrated power company, Tata Power recently unveiled its new initiative with a leading virtual power plant (VPP) and distributed energy management system (DERMS) provider, AutoGrid to deploy an AI-enabled smart energy management system focusing on the behavioural demand response across its residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Mumbai. The partners intend to help address peak demand challenges and support India’s clean energy transition and net-zero goals.
It is noteworthy that the demand response management program aims to engage 55,000 residential consumers and 6,000 large commercial and industrial (C&I) customers to achieve 75 MW of peak capacity reduction, within the first six months of the rollout, beginning February 2023, and then continue to scale up to 200 MW by the summer of 2025.
After their initial successful partnership in 2021 with the launch of a demand response program for Tata Power Delhi Distribution’s residential customers in Delhi, the two companies significantly expanded the initiative within the Delhi distribution region in 2022. Lately, AutoGrid is extending this program across Tata Power’s distribution territories to include all consumer segments.
CEO & MD of Tata Power, Dr Praveer Sinha believed that an AI-enabled demand behavioural response system has the potential to empower customers and make them join the energy transition journey. “Tata Power is committed to make this advanced system mainstream and promote a culture of hi-tech energy conservation. Our association with AutoGrid allows us to partner with our customers in load management and help them save on their energy consumption,” said Dr Sinha.
It is learnt that in addition to the behavioural demand response (BDR) program, Tata Power will stack on an automated demand response (ADR) program with direct load control assisted by customer participation with its in-house smart plug platform called ‘EZ Home’.
The company mentioned that with this program built on the AutoGrid Flex platform, consumers can earn incentives by choosing to curtail their load in response to signals relayed via text messages and/or email during times of critical need. It said that the aggregation of small demand adjustments by consumers has the potential to eliminate the need for costly and heavy-polluting plants.
Founder and CEO of AutoGrid, Amit Narayan said: “India and Tata Power can reach ambitious sustainability goals by leveraging the flexible capacity available by adopting innovative approaches to leverage distributed energy resources. At AutoGrid, we feel privileged and passionate about supporting Tata Power’s visionary efforts to collaborate with its customers through behavioural and AI-driven demand orchestration.”
Established at Stanford University in 2011, AutoGrid aims to accelerate the transition to renewable energy worldwide in order to combat the climate crisis. Its AI-driven software claims to make distributed energy resources smarter, enabling prediction, optimization, and real-time control of energy assets, including electric vehicles, batteries, roof-top solar, utility-scale wind, storage, and more.
Tata Power is one of India’s largest integrated power companies and together with its subsidiaries and jointly controlled entities, claims to have an installed/managed capacity of 14101 MW. The company has a presence across the entire power value chain – generation of renewable as well as conventional power including hydro and thermal energy, transmission & distribution and trading.
