Camus Energy’s Grid Management platform empowers utilities and energy providers with system-wide visibility, forecasting, and advanced controls for a distributed, zero-carbon future.
To tell us more about Camus Energy and how they are driving sustainability we have Michael who is the COO of Camus Energy.
What problem is Camus Energy trying to solve?
Utilities and energy providers today are facing massive-scale shifts in the grid environment. The rapidly falling costs of solar and wind generation has resulted in renewables, rather than natural gas or coal, capturing 90% of new power supply capacity in the United States — with similar trends around the world. Meanwhile, consumers globally are adopting tens of millions of distributed energy resources (DERs) like rooftop solar systems, home batteries, smart thermostats and electric vehicles. These trends are creating new challenges and opportunities for grid operators, and we are giving them tools to manage these changes.
How are you addressing this problem?
Our software platform provides utilities and energy providers with a unified interface for monitoring, analysis, and control of local grid conditions — leveraging both utility and customer-owned devices. Bringing together grid-wide visibility and forecasting with control of distributed energy resources enables grid operators to manage increasingly complex grids and serve the needs of their communities.
The most common use cases for our platform include:
- Integration of local renewables: enabling greater adoption of low-cost, distribution-connected renewable generation by providing monitoring and management of local grid conditions
- Peak demand management: reducing peak energy costs by forecasting peak periods and dispatching utility and customer-owned devices (like batteries and EV chargers) to lower peak energy demand
- Engineering insights: leveraging integrated data from utility IT and OT systems, customer devices, and public data sources to enable high-value engineering analyses like transformer loading and hosting capacity
Looking forward, we are developing capabilities that will enable the transition to a Distribution System Operator (DSO) model — where local utilities leverage customer resources to support around-the-clock grid operations:
- Scheduling coordination: viewing committed purchases, forecasted demand, and all available supply options, including flexible loads and distributed generation, to close the gap between contracted supply and forecasted demand
- Market integration of local resources: enable distributed energy resources and related aggregations to participate in wholesale markets, supporting FERC Order 2222 and offering revenue opportunities to DER owners
- Local energy markets: introduce local real-time pricing opportunities to procure energy and grid support services from community members via load shifting and/or distributed generation
How do you differentiate yourself?
Our secret sauce is our distributed systems approach, pioneered by our co-founders at Google to manage a network with billions of endpoints. We marry decades of experience building world-class distributed computing systems at companies like Google and SpaceX with close collaboration with our utility customers and partners to deliver flexible, future-proof software. Compared to the closest incumbent technology, known as an Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS), our platform is more flexible, scalable, secure, lower cost and faster to implement. And by building on open-source principles, in contrast with a traditional black-box approach, our platform provides flexibility to our customers to adapt the software in-house. We also leverage a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service approach to maximize scalability, bolster reliability and security, hasten deployment and lower costs.
By leveraging modern software best practices from Big Tech and other industries, we’re providing utilities and energy providers with the best tools to manage change.
How does your partnership with SAP help in driving sustainability?
We are building the utility platform of the future by integrating diverse data sets and leveraging cloud-scale computation to manage change on the grid. By integrating with SAP Cloud for Energy, we can expand our platform to SAP’s global utility customers and provide them with the tools they need to safely manage the transition to a zero-carbon energy future.
For further information on sustainability, you can refer to the Sustainability topic page. If you have any questions, you can post them in the community.
Call to action: To learn more about the startups and how they are partnering with SAP to drive sustainability, join us at our SAP.iO Sustainability in Energy and Natural Resources Demo Day on January 27 – Register here 🎉
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