Honeywell and demand response aggregator company, Pearlstone Energy, have teamed up to provide a ‘smart grid programme’ for industrial and commercial facilities in the UK, including hospitals.
The programme aims to reduce energy bills, help improve country-wide power reliability, and meet carbon reduction commitments. Pearlstone Energy will pay participants to reduce their energy consumption for short periods when electricity demands exceed availability. It will partner with Honeywell to identify short-term energy reduction measures in buildings, and, having conducted site audits to assist in the design of these measures, will provide the technology to automate these reductions, free, to the facility owners.
The programme’s centrepiece is Honeywell’s Demand Response Automation Server (DRAS) software-as-a-service (SaaS), which allows Pearlstone Energy to ‘communicate’ with buildings to trigger pre-specified short-term energy reduction measures during peak demand, or peak pricing periods, when buildings are charged more for their energy. Pearlstone can then aggregate the resulting energy reserves and seek to apply them toward grid stabilisation efforts, by tendering for National Grid’s Short Term Operating Reserve (STOR) service.
