Tendril Redefines Demand Response with the Launch of Orchestrated Energy

New Continuous Demand Management Solution Delivers up to 50 Percent Peak
Load Reduction without Sacrificing Customer Comfort; Allows Utilities to
Solve Today’s Network Challenges and Establish Their Role in the
Connected Home

BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Tendril
today announced Orchestrated
Energy™, the first cloud software solution enabling utilities and
other energy providers to simultaneously optimize system operation and
customer comfort. Orchestrated Energy is a Continuous
Demand Management (CDM) solution that calculates a home’s
thermal mass, predicts consumer behavior and integrates with connected
devices, to create a unique dispatch schedule for every home, every day.
In pilot programs with some of the largest utilities in North America,
Tendril Orchestrated Energy reduced HVAC peak load by up to 50 percent
and lowered energy consumption from cooling by up to 20 percent.
Orchestrated Energy will soon expand from controlling smart thermostats
to co-optimizing other Distributed Energy Resources (DERS), like water
heaters, solar systems and electric vehicles, making it the first truly
comprehensive home energy management platform.

“The power sector today faces unprecedented challenges in reducing costs
and enhancing customer value, while rebuilding its infrastructure and
integrating ever cheaper, but highly variable, renewable energy,” said
Steve Corneli, Principal of Strategies for Clean Energy Innovation.
“Orchestrated Energy is designed to work seamlessly with both utilities
and competitive DER service providers, providing the first truly
scalable solution to managing residential load in real-time, while
dramatically increasing energy efficiency and enhancing the customer’s
value proposition. The results – lower power supply costs, better
targeted infrastructure investment, more efficient integration of
renewables, and happier customers – should be compelling to utilities,
competitive energy service providers, and regulators across the country.”

Over the past few years, smart thermostats have become an increasingly
important entry point to the connected home. Accenture predicts
approximately 55 million smart thermostats will be installed in homes
across North America by 2025. Although smart thermostats have been an
important breakthrough, significant untapped potential remains. Fully
leveraging the capability of smart thermostats – and ultimately other
DERS – lies in unlocking the ability to continuously manage demand and
to truly optimize energy use in the connected home.

Orchestrated Energy is the only data analytics software solution to
provide detailed insight into home characteristics, weather patterns and
consumer behaviors. It achieves twice the energy efficiency savings of a
smart thermostat alone, delivers three times the peak demand reduction
from the HVAC system and creates a path to manage other devices and
DERS. As a result, it helps utilities finally deliver truly
customer-friendly demand response programs today while preparing for a
future characterized by DERS.

ecobee
participated in the summer 2016 field trials of Orchestrated Energy.
Additional smart thermostat partnerships have been formed with Honeywell
and Energate,
meaning Orchestrated Energy, a device-agnostic platform, can connect to
and control a range of additional devices.

“As Tendril’s pilot smart thermostat partner, we think the peak demand
modeling within Orchestrated Energy is a great innovation available to
utilities,” said Chris Carradine, Executive Vice President at ecobee.
“We are excited to continue to work with companies like Tendril who see
the untapped potential that exists in leveraging smart thermostats to
maintain grid stability while keeping customers comfortable.”

Introducing Tendril Orchestrated Energy

Tendril Orchestrated Energy is a transformative cloud-based residential
Continuous Demand Management (CDM) platform that optimizes consumption,
generation and storage to meet customer needs at the lowest cost for the
utility. It leverages the company’s TrueHome Simulation Model to truly
understand the individual and their home. By collecting and processing
300 data elements on items like the home’s footprint, local weather
conditions, and what motivates residents to act, Tendril ensures that
energy services are highly personalized. Orchestrated Energy far exceeds
any other demand management solution on the market today because it:

• Continuously Optimizes Energy for Every Home – It creates a
  unique and personalized optimization plan for every home, every day
  based on building characteristics, local weather patterns, system
  conditions, and individual needs of the consumer. Other solutions use
  a basic set of rules or profiles layered on top of a traditional
  Direct Load Control program mindset – like precooling a home an hour
  before a load shedding event or assigning each person to 1 of 10 stock
  demand management schedules.
• Reshapes Demand Without Compromising Comfort – It offers
  outcome-based customer control with adaptive learning. Customers set
  their basic preferences and Orchestrated Energy learns additional
  patterns and tendencies. It then optimizes around the system needs,
  but without ever violating the customers’ desired comfort range.
• Supports TOU Rates and Enhances Existing DR Investments – It
  can seamlessly integrate with existing Direct Load Control programs to
  deliver better savings at a reduced cost, while also establishing
  happier customers. In addition, Orchestrated Energy can be optimized
  around different price signals or variables that the utility provides,
  such as Time of Use (TOU) pricing signals. This approach is
  differentiated from existing solutions, which only respond to direct
  commands to shed load.
• Is Future Proof and Device Agnostic – It sits atop an open
  software platform that can work with any distributed generation,
  storage or smart energy device in the home (thermostats, water
  heaters, appliances, pool pumps, solar panels, electric vehicles,
  storage devices, etc.). It also helps utilities proactively prepare
  for a range of imminent regulatory challenges: REV-like reforms,
  net-metering battles, a push toward TOU rates, and rate case pressures.
• Delivers Scalable Orchestration – It scales to manage the
  entire connected home simultaneously and manages multiple homes to
  optimize a neighborhood, circuit, region or entire system. It can then
  be dispatched like a virtual power plant, making it a true utility
  resource.
• Taps Into the Mobile Revolution – It is offered as a
  module in Tendril MyHome, the first unified, personalized,
  mobile-first application for the energy industry. As a result,
  participating consumers can establish an Energy ID that optimizes
  recommendations, tracks their savings and shares information that
  could determine future settings.

“Orchestrated Energy is the final piece of a vision we have been
pursuing for more than a decade,” said Adrian Tuck, CEO, Tendril. “We’ve
introduced leading solutions that allow our utility partners to provide
a seamless multi-channel consumer experience, and now continuously
manage demand to both solve today’s network challenges and allow energy
providers to play a central role in the connected home. With
Orchestrated Energy, we have rationalized the grid edge and made it work
for all ecosystem players so the energy industry can define its own
future.”

Additional Resources:

• Orchestrated
  Energy Solution Page
• Whitepaper: Demand
  More from DR
• Video: Overview
  of Orchestrated Energy
• Demand
  Management Timeline
• Bylined Article: The
  Energy Storage Device We Haven’t Considered: Our Homes
• The
  Tendril Blog

About Tendril

Tendril delivers personalized energy experiences for consumers around
the world. Pioneering energy providers that want to establish a
competitive advantage rely on our software and solutions to better
acquire, engage and activate their customers. To do this, we employ the
latest in energy science and data analytics to unveil a complete
understanding of the individual consumer, including their unique needs
and propensities to act. With this granular understanding, we help our
customers unlock the true value of energy interactions. For more
information, please visit http://www.tendrilinc.com
or follow us on Twitter at @Tendril.

Contacts

Tendril
Elaine Reddy, 720-252-8105
ereddy@tendrilinc.com