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The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) has selected five cooperative utilities to join its Community-Integrated Distributed Energy Resilience (CIDER) project:
Funded by the Department of Energy's (DOE) Renewables Advancing Community Energy Resilience (RACER) program, CIDER will demonstrate a groundbreaking approach to dispatching local energy resources for both cost savings and accelerated outage restoration.
NRECA selected Camus Energy as its utility-facing orchestration platform and Emulate Energy as the member-facing enrollment and device controls platform. Power Systems Engineering (PSE) will be supporting the project as a program design and development consultant. Together, the CIDER team will deploy a turnkey solution for grid-aware management of distributed energy resources (DERs), enabling co-ops to dispatch member-owned resources for lower peak electricity costs, faster outage restoration, and more reliable grid operations.
“Utilities, especially co-ops, have an incredible opportunity to address ongoing cost and resilience issues through DERs; this program provides the necessary tools to do that,” said Astrid Atkinson, CEO and co-founder of Camus Energy.
“We’re excited to work with NRECA, Emulate, PSE and the forward-thinking co-ops selected for this program to unlock new opportunities for operators and members alike," continued Astrid. "This program allows all parties to make the most of devices already plugged in at the grid edge: EVs, batteries, smart thermostats, and more. I’m confident the success of this program will ultimately benefit and inspire utilities throughout the country by showing them what’s possible.”
The CIDER project commenced in July 2023 and will continue through June 2026.
Learn more at NRECA News.
