Company will deploy Innowatts Platform for Smart Meter enabled Load Forecasting and Analytics across its US Residential retail energy business
Innowatts LLC, a leading provider of machine learning enabled platform solutions for the Utilities, Energy Retailers and Energy Consumers, today announced a multi year partnership with Direct Energy, a subsidiary of Centrica plc. CNA (LON) and the largest US Residential Retail Energy provider in North America. As part of this partnership, Innowatts will provide smart-meter enabled load analytics and forecasting solution, to its US residential energy supply business, which provides competitive energy supply and services to over five million customers.
The agreement marks a significant expansion for Innowatts in Texas. The Innowatts platform currently analyzes over 25% of the ERCOT smart meters for various clients, which includes Direct Energy’s retail energy operations in Texas.
“Energy Demand Forecasting is critical to the success of our business and is at the heart of many of our underlying business processes”, says Predrag Popovic, Director Commercial Operations, Direct Energy. “The daily and intra-day forecasts delivered through the Innowatts platform have improved our overall forecast performance, surpassing what was considered as industry best practice level and have lowered our energy procurement costs. This next phase of the partnership will help us extend these gains into other parts of our North American operations, as well as provide insights to other business functions and customer across Direct Energy’s footprint.”
Innowatts proprietary energy analytics platform allow Utilities to increase forecast accuracy and successfully address the challenges caused by uncertainty in commodity costs, climate, customer behavior and technology. Innowatts solutions combine customer level consumption data and other behavioral intelligence with machine learning technology to create granular level forecasts that are considerably more accurate than conventional approaches.
“We are very excited about the next phase of this partnership and what it represents for Direct Energy and the industry as a whole”, said Siddhartha Sachdeva of Innowatts. “Our collaboration over the past two years allowed us to apply and demonstrate the value of our analytical models in one of the world’s most competitive and dynamic energy markets, and has produced some real breakthroughs in thinking that we believe will shift how the industry thinks about and manages uncertainty and risk in its energy portfolios. This new phase of work will allow us to refine and build upon our joint successes and move us closer to making Innowatts the industry standard for energy forecasting and predictive analytics.”
The smart meter enabled self-learning models utilized in Texas have been especially valuable in micro regions that can vary significantly intra-day based on variances in behavior and shifting weather dynamics. The cloud based platform delivers validated day ahead and intra-day forecast to key users and stakeholders across the organization, along with reports highlighting variance statistics and other backcast performance indicators.
