LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In a move that advances the capabilities and value proposition across the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) landscape, leading grid solutions providers Swell Energy Inc. (Swell) and Shifted Energy (Shifted) today announced a strategic alliance and digital partnership designed to deliver greater value to the expanding base of energy consumers and utilities they serve. Across key energy markets, VPPs are rapidly becoming the most efficient solution to maintaining a cost-effective power supply in the face of a changing energy landscape, an aging grid, and the occurrence of extreme weather events. As VPPs become a mainstay of the grid, continuing to augment VPP capabilities has become a critical mandate for the sector. By harnessing the combined capabilities and market approaches of Swell and Shifted, the partnership amplifies the scope and value of their existing and future VPP projects by vastly broadening the types of distributed energy resources (DERs) and devices that can be synchronized and aggregated into their VPPs.

The partnership is centered on merging the capabilities of Shifted’s distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) Grid Maestro™ with Swell's DERMS GridAmp™ into a single, comprehensive, and unique offering that allows utilities to manage otherwise disparate assets in a synchronized and holistic manner. This turnkey VPP solution can be integrated into any utility’s existing SCADA platform to provide high-fidelity forecasts of energy demand and generation across a wide array of customer-sited DERs, devices, and appliances, and can further be used to manage these assets in an integrated manner within a VPP. Considered to be best-in-class technologies on their own, GridAmp™ and Grid Maestro™ now come together to deliver superior functionality to the grid through enhanced AI learning and decisioning that allows consumers and utilities to optimize how customer-sited DERs and devices interact with the broader grid. Whereas the GridAmp™ platform has perfected the smart management and dispatch of solar PV and energy storage assets into the development of VPPs, the Grid Maestro™ platform has specialized in the smart management of household loads, including water heaters, thermostats, pool pumps, EV chargers, and smart appliances. The fusion of these two grid technologies offers a comprehensive and scalable solution to streamline the management of emerging energy assets, optimize system performance across the entire electrified home, and enhance customer experience and value.

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