Enervee was selected from hundreds of nominations, and Anne Arquit Niederberger, VP Market Development, accepted the award on June 27th, 2017 during the networking reception at Grid Edge World Forum in San Jose, California.
Enervee is thrilled to receive this recognition. Our data team, engineers and designers are bringing products to market that help utilities meet the expectations of their residential customers for a simple, seamless and personalized experience that allows them to manage their energy.
The Grid Edge Awards represent the top 20 companies or projects that showcase innovative products, introduce new business models to the electric sector, or otherwise present alternative ways of managing the electric grid that are more efficient and reliable.
Enervee’s customer engagement platform, which is helping utilities build an ongoing, value-added relationship as trusted energy advisor with their residential customers, was selected by Greentech Media, following the successful US rollout of Marektplace 2.0:
“The platform offers a seamless, simple (yet sophisticated) and personalized energy management experience across energy efficiency, demand response and distributed energy resource offerings, such as solar. By partnering with utilities, retailers, publishers, and manufacturers to share efficiency data, Enervee’s platform grows the digitally connected utility audience and facilitates targeted digital marketing — which not only drives program participation, but also opens up new revenue streams for utilities, in support of innovative business models.”
Every year, Greentech Media seeks to highlight the industry leaders paving the way toward tomorrow’s distributed energy system.
We were also pleased to see that a number of Enervee’s existing clients are among the 2017 cohort of award winners: Avista, Con Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, and San Diego Gas & Electric.
Started in 2014, Grid Edge Award winners have included start-ups, established technology vendors, utilities, energy providers, among others.
The 2017 Grid Edge World Forum itself kicked off earlier the same day with a series of sessions under the theme of a consumer-driven grid, and Anne Arquit Niederberger participated in the opening panel entitled “The Amazon of Energy: Do We Need One?”
Her answer? Amazon is already part of the energy industry, generating enough wind & solar energy to power San Jose’s residential and commercial buildings, with commitments to meet 50% of Amazon Web Services needs with renewable energy this year (and ultimately 100%). In addition, Amazon’s virtual personal assistant, Alexa, is in homes, helping energy customers control end-use devices from thermostats to light bulbs and smart appliances.
Anne drew parallels between Amazon’s transformation from online book selling in 1995 to serving as the platform of choice for retail transactions to the direction that utilities are headed. Under the REV (reinventing the energy vision) proceedings in NY, regulators have gone to far as to cast utilities in a new role as “distribution system platform (DSP) provider” and facilitator of energy transactions of all kinds. Enervee’s customer engagement platform is helping Con Edison and other utilities do just that.
She also said that utilities would do well to learn from Amazon’s success, by adopting a customer focus, nurturing a culture of innovation and embracing trends, such as decentralized, decarbonized and digital energy.
At Enervee, we’re fortunate to be working in jurisdictions that are pushing the envelope, from completely deregulated markets in Europe to NY and CA in the USA. In Europe, you see utilities beginning to diversify their offerings beyond selling commodity energy to capitalize on their client base and energy expertise.
E.ON’s SolarCloud in Germany is just one example, Customers store energy in a virtual account to use when and where they want, for example, to charge their EVs away from home, or to share with friends and neighbors.
Exciting as ever, the GTM event provided rapid-fire panel sessions on the state of technology at the grid edge. One of the most exciting things we heard is that great progress has been made on bundling and managing residential demand to deliver grid services that can be valued by the wholesale market. And we’re not just talking about smart thermostats. Jan-Willem Rombouts (Co-Founder of REstore) mentioned that they are partnering with manufacturers in Europe to embed communication technology directly into consumer goods, such as appliances, simplifying participation in demand response programs for residential customers.
