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Leading the charge towards a community-centric grid, Camus Energy secures $16M Series A to advance real-time utility operations

KCEC came to Camus Energy with a simple, yet ambitious goal to achieve 100% daytime solar by 2022. By thoughtfully increasing its use of local solar, KCEC could reduce the cost of electricity, bolster consumer choice and equity, and support grid reliability.

In the United States, more than 95 million smart meters provide tens of billions of data points to utilities each day. Adding information from line sensors, substation monitoring, and other utility-owned equipment, grid operators have a wealth of data at their disposal. That information is powerful…when it’s put to use.

The project leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to fill data gaps from unmetered solar, improve grid operations, reduce energy costs, and advance decarbonization.

The technology to create virtual power plants made up of distributed energy resources (DERs) is here. They can replace conventional, fossil-fueled power plants and enable a cleaner, cheaper and more resilient grid.

Data is king. Data empowers. When leveraged properly, data enables flexibility and accelerates change.

Join our member webinar Wednesday, December 16 when Camus Energy and Kit Carson Electric Cooperative (KCEC) discuss the Rise of Local Grid Management with a focus on how KCEC lowered energy costs while increasing renewable energy penetration on their local grid.

We love working with electric cooperatives and municipal utilities. That’s not only because we get to work with inspiring people, but because co-ops and munis are uniquely positioned for system-wide adoption of renewables and the transition to a cleaner and more equitable power system.

We are happy to announce that we have put that philosophy to work in a partnership with VMware.

When we started Camus, one of our goals was to contribute our software expertise to the most important problem of our lifetimes. We know that technology can be a powerful enabler for change, and we wanted to bring best practices from the software industry into the grid sector.

At Google I helped define a distributed computing approach which scaled us more than 10,000x. As the grid makes a similar jump, from 1000s of reliable generators to millions of unreliable participants, what can we learn?

One of the privileges of working with great partners like Kit Carson Electric Cooperative Inc. is the opportunity to join their conversation with the local community. We were excited to meet recently with Net Metering Advisory group and Renewable Taos to share our work on understanding and managing the role of local solar generation in KCEC’s grid.

We just finished sharing thoughts on large scale monitoring and telemetry with MISO, and I wanted to share a few reflections on applying lessons from internet scale systems to managing the electrical grid.

These are strange times; due to covid-19 the Bay Area went under a “shelter in place” order at midnight. Like all local companies, we at Camus Energy are managing through this, and we wanted to share a little of how we are thinking about that.

Building these systems is hard, and there’s not a good name for it (we’d call it “distributed systems engineering”). It is the model that the cloud was built to enable, and it’s a fundamental shift from the way that software worked before.

Hey all, as we kick off the new year, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2019 and take a look forward. We’re entering a new decade, which is a momentous occasion – and at a time which is particularly delicately balanced.