Viridity Energy is seeing an increased interest in its platform to transform customers resources into a 24/7 virtual power plant, and the Philadelphia-based company is adding new customers at an impressive clip.
That excitement was on display last week at the Advanced Energy Leaders Conference at Drexel Universitys Bossone Research Enterprise Center. The confab of regional thought leaders discussed the evolving future for Greater Philadelphia and the entire Mid-Atlantic region, particularly as it applies to advanced energy and smart grid and microgrid technologies.
What we wanted to accomplish at this conference is to talk about the issues and how our region is becoming a leader in smart grid and microgrid technologies from the utility perspective but also from the customer perspective, says Viridity CEO Audrey Zibelman, a featured speaker at the event who talked about the environmental and sustainability benefits of advanced grid technologies. From everything I saw and heard we accomplished that and I think folks are very excited.
Zibelman also touted the innovative microgrid projects being engineered at Drexel based on the companys proprietary VPower technology, which enables clients to participate in wholesale power markets while simultaneously achieving sustainability objectives. It combines proprietary load forecasting techniques, market pricing forecasts, advanced generation, storage and demanding forecast algorithms and a powerful optimizer.
This week, the company announced it will be working with EDSA Power Analytics to develop and deploy technology for a groundbreaking microgrid project at the University of California, San Diego. Viridity will combine VPower with EDSAs Paladin SmartGrid to provide power system optimization and energy market optimization capabilities for the campus-wide microgrid, which is recognized as one of the most technologically advanced in the world and serves a daily population of 45,000 (82 percent of the annual power on campus).
The more we can create a market for these resources, the more they become sustainable and avoid the need to build new distribution and transmission capabilities, says Zibelman, whose company has grown from three employees when it was founded in 20008 to 30.
Source: Audrey Zibelman, Viridity Energy
Writer: Joe Petrucci
