AutoGrid Systems and Silver Spring Networks today announced a strategic partnership to jointly develop the Silver Spring UtilityIQ Demand Optimizer solution, powered by AutoGrid, to enable utilities, grid operators, service providers, and large power consumers to implement traditional and advanced demand response and demand side management programs quickly, securely and cost-effectively.

Under this agreement, Silver Spring Networks is reselling AutoGrid's technology and integrating it into the newly announced Silver Spring UtilityIQ Demand Optimizer solution, a demand response optimization and management offering.

"Utilities, electric service providers, and their customers want to take advantage of demand side management technologies to reduce electricity cost and improve system reliability. The challenge has been the cost, capital and hard work needed to implement and manage these programs. By pre-integrating with Silver Spring Networks proven networking platform we are able to significantly reduce the time, cost and risk of implementing demand response while simultaneously increasing the overall yield and effectiveness of these programs," said Dr. Amit Narayan, founder and CEO of AutoGrid.

The new Silver Spring UtilityIQ Demand Optimizer solution helps utilities manage peak load, implement real-time demand response initiatives, and optimize load across all curtailment programs and customer segments. Combining Big Data analytics, Internet-scale cloud computing and open standards, the Silver Spring UtilityIQ Demand Optimizer solution reduces the cost of implementing demand side management programs while increasing the energy yield from these programs.

Silver Spring's demand side management solutions are also at the heart of Oklahoma Gas & Electric's (OG&E) SmartHours initiative. Silver Spring is expanding the scope of its existing solution with OG&E by deploying the Silver Spring UtilityIQ Demand Optimizer solution to further encourage OG&E customers to shift their energy use to off-peak hours.

The Silver Spring UtilityIQ Demand Optimizer solution, powered by AutoGrid, delivers integrated Demand Response Management capabilities including:

• A Unified View of All Available Resources Across All Programs. The solution allows utilities and service providers to view available capacity across all customer segments, load types, geographic locations, and programs from a single dashboard. The system supports all variations of traditional direct load control, critical peak pricing, variable pricing, and peak-time rebate.
• Real-Time Load Forecasting and Event Monitoring. Advanced machine learning techniques generate accurate real-time predictions of individual loads, response to load shed requests or price signals. 
• Comprehensive Networking and Communications. Supports communication and dispatch to any device, over any channel of communication including over Silver Spring's Smart Energy Platform, broadband internet and cellular.
• Broad Ecosystem of DR Field Devices. Supports a wide ecosystem of devices and all commonly used industry standards such as OpenADR 1.0 and 2.0, SEP 1.x, as well as a number of other proprietary and legacy protocols.
• Powerful Optimization. Provides dispatch optimization across disparate DR programs and systems, such as load control, time of use, and price response, among others to improve the overall yield and effectiveness of the programs.
• Powerful Measurement, Verification, Analytics and Reporting. Provides a large library of reports for accurately calculating and comparing event and program performances across any customer or program attributes by analyzing actual consumption data from the smart meters immediately on completion of the event.
• High Security, Reliability and Scalability.