Zen Within will help stabilise California’s power grid after being awarded Demand Response Capacity as part of Southern California Edison’s (SCE) Aliso Canyon Demand Response initiative.

Zen’s support of the Aliso Canyon program signifies its arrival in the Demand Response Aggregation space, leveraging electrical loads managed by its Zen HQ cloud application and Zen Thermostats, to provide a lower cost DR solution to utilities.

In October 2015, Aliso Canyon, the largest natural gas storage facility in California, suffered the nation’s worst ever gas leak that lowered Aliso Canyon’s gas stores to under 20% of capacity and put Southern California at risk of up to 14 days of blackouts, according to a commissioned Assessment Report.

Zen responded to a call by SCE for DR capacity, and the deal was awarded based on its ability to provide cost-effective demand response. Zen will dispatch demand response through the Zen HQ platform, which leverages OpenADR to automate temperature adjustments via Zen Thermostats, and in some cases, turning off non-critical customer loads.

As part of the SCE program Zen will reduce commercial and industrial loads from a range of customer verticals, including national retailers, commercial offices, schools, and local government facilities.

James McPhail, EVP Zen Within, explained the key role Zen will play in aiding this initiative, “Unlike most aggregators, Zen is providing both the capacity and the load enabling technology, delivering SCE a turn-key, cost-effective Demand Response solution.”

McPhail also added, “The greatest victory will be the reliability of the Southern Californian grid. The environment will benefit by not having to utilize peaking power plants, and the ratepayers will benefit by not having to import electricity during the highest peak price periods of the year.”

Demand Response will play a major part this year in helping to keep Southern California’s energy grid stable and Zen is proud to be part of the solution.