California’s DRAM Auction Contracts for 82MW of Distributed Energy as Grid Resource
Greentech Media reports on the continuation of California’s groundbreaking test of distributed energy resources (DERs) as aggregated grid assets. Several Olivine DER Coalition members won contracts in California’s 2017 DRAM. From GTM:
Late last week, California’s big three investor-owned utilities announced the winners of 81.6 megawatts’ worth of contracts for the Demand Response Auction Mechanism, or DRAM. It’s the second auction for a multiyear project that represents one of the biggest tests in the country of a fundamental premise of the grid edge — that DERs, like battery-backed solar PV, energy storage, plug-in electric vehicles, and smart thermostats and other energy-controlling devices, can work in concert to solve problems at the utility scale.
We’ve been covering DRAM since its inception as a California Public Utilities Commission-mandated pilot project, and examined it in depth in a GTM Squared piece last autumn. We also got into some details in January, after utilities Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric named the winners of bids to provide a combined 40-odd megawatts of aggregated grid resources for the 2016 year.