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CPower Customers Help Prevent Blackouts by Providing More Than 50GWh of Load Relief During Winter Storm Elliott
CPower Managed Customer DER Participation in 197 Dispatches Across 19 States and the District of Columbia
BALTIMORE – January 17, 2023 – CPower Energy (“CPower”), the national leader in unlocking the power of customer Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), today announced that its customers provided more than 50GWh of load relief during Winter Storm Elliott in late December 2022, an amount of energy equivalent to the daily energy use of more than 1.7 million homes. CPower dispatched customer DERs 197 times across three programs in the PJM and ISO-NE markets: PJM Emergency Capacity and Synch Reserves, and ISO-NE Active-Demand Capacity Reserves (ADCR). The PJM market covers all or a portion of 13 states including Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia. The ISO-NE market covers the New England region which includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Winter Storm Elliott was the first time PJM’s Emergency Capacity program called winter events since the 2014 Polar Vortex and the first capacity event in ISO-NE since the Labor Day 2018 unplanned outage of the Mystic Generating Station. With extreme weather events occurring increasingly often throughout the United States, regulators and grid operators are looking to customer DERs to relieve strain on aging grid infrastructure and help keep the power on during times of high energy demand. While historically the times of highest demand have occurred during warmer months, energy markets across the U.S. are also seeing an increase in winter demand in relation to growing heating electrification. This trend is expected to continue, making customer DERs an increasingly valuable resource to provide load relief and prevent blackouts during extreme weather events year-round.
“The events of Winter Storm Elliott demonstrate the unpredictability and fragility of our country’s energy infrastructure. But there is a solution today: customer-powered DERs proved their ability to alleviate grid strain during extreme winter weather events. During this storm, our customers helped entire regions to avoid grid failures and allowed people within those regions to celebrate the holidays with peace of mind.” said John Horton, President and CEO, CPower. “CPower understands the increasing value of customer DERs as a grid resource in the face of extreme weather events year-round and will continue helping customers provide critical support to the grid when it is needed most.”
CPower is hosting a webinar on January 31 at 1:00 PM EST to help businesses in PJM understand the increasing importance of DERs in providing grid resiliency during winter months and learn how they can get paid for providing load relief to the grid. To register, please visit: http://bit.ly/CPowerPJMDRWebinar.
About CPower Energy
CPower Energy is the national leader of grid balancing and reliability solutions to enable a flexible, clean and dependable energy future. With 6.3 GW of customer-powered capacity at more than 17,000 sites across the U.S., we unlock the full value of distributed energy resources to strengthen the grid when and where it’s needed most. CPower is based in Baltimore, Maryland and is owned by LS Power, a development, investment, and operating company focused on the power and energy infrastructure sector. For more information, visit: www.cpowerenergy.com.
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