AutoGrid recently announced that it was awarded US$2.25 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE's) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The funding will be used to significantly increase the scalability and electric vehicle (EV) management capabilities of AutoGrid's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Flex Virtual Power Plant (VPP) platform.
"Asset owners and power providers today face a greater number and diversity of distributed energy resources (DERs) than ever before, and optimizing them requires flexible solutions that can handle increasingly complex networks," said Rahul Kar, general manager and VP, New Energy, AutoGrid. "The DOE's award serves as pivotal support of our Flex platform and will help further our work, boosting flexibility and maximizing value streams from storage, renewables, EVs, and other distributed assets."
The expanded Flex capabilities include scaling real-time co-optimization up to 100,000 assets, and expanding the platform's features and functionality for EV fleet management. AutoGrid is currently supporting the buildout of the world's largest VPP by asset volume in Japan with local partner ENERES, and offers its Flex platform for EV fleet owners and power providers to manage networks of charging stations.
AutoGrid received this competitive award from ARPA-E's Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential (SCALEUP) program, building on ARPA-E's primary focus of supporting the scaling of transformational and disruptive technologies across the full spectrum of energy applications. This is the second time AutoGrid has received ARPA-E support, having previously been awarded US$3.5 million by the office's Green Electricity Network Integration (GENI) program in 2012.
