Itron, Inc. announced a collaboration with Xcel Energy to manage the growing number of distributed energy resources (DERs) in Colorado, including residential battery energy storage, to support grid flexibility and customer choice. As part of this collaboration, Xcel Energy has contracted with Itron to deploy an Aggregator Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) from Itron?s Grid Edge Intelligence portfolio to help manage DERs. As consumer adoption of battery energy storage continues to grow, energy providers can use Aggregator DERMS to enlist consumer-owned residential battery storage at the edge of the grid as a resource to support the grid.
Residential batteries, and other DERs, can help optimize grid operations, promoting greater system reliability, lower energy costs and increased customer choice to adopt solar generation and electric vehicles. Aggregator DERMS enables both aggregated management of DERs for tasks such as load balancing and demand response as well as localized management of DERs for managing solar panels, EV chargers and smart thermostats. Itron?s Aggregator DERMS allows Xcel Energy to use residential battery storage through its Renewable Battery Connect program to manage peak loads and to support reliable electric service to customers.