Olivine wins Grid Edge Award

Greentech Media named Olivine a top 20 company demonstrating potential to shape tomorrow’s distributed energy system.  Grid Edge Award winners include pioneers, established technology vendors, utilities, energy providers, and others who showcase innovative products, market-disrupting business models and an overall forward-looking vision.

These are the companies that are transforming the grid edge industry into a “new grid will require technologies and business models that can link utilities and customers to turn distributed energy resources (DERs) like rooftop solar and electric vehicles from grid disruptors into grid assets,” said Greentech Media.

The publication called out Olivine’s role in laying the groundwork for how California’s grid edge-enabled DERs can play a role in utility and grid operations through a series of pilot projects with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E):

We’ve covered how companies such as Stem, Ohmconnect and Green Charge Networks have taken advantage of these pilot programs. But the mastermind of these pilots is San Ramon, Calif.-based Olivine, the “scheduling coordinator” that manages the interaction of these third-party resources with programs run by the state’s grid operator, CAISO.

That puts Olivine in the position of arbitrating the state’s initial moves from traditional centrally controlled, siloed demand response, into a new paradigm based on market signals and broad-based participation by distributed energy owners and aggregators. The DRAM pilot is the next step, but CEO Beth Reid has also told us that we should stay tuned for PG&E’s Excess Supply Pilot (XSP), which will for the first time pay end users who can absorb excess solar and wind energy, as well as turn down energy to reduce peak loads.

See all the 2016 Grid Edge Award winners