Digitalization platform for electricity retailers based on Virtual Battery technology

The electricity market is changing fast and close to 8,000 retailers in Europe and US are grasping for ways to digitize their product offering. In parallel, the energy transition to intermittent renewables brings with it enormous need for energy storage and demand flexibility. Emulate addresses both these needs with its novel platform based on cutting edge research conducted at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) by one of the co-founders.

Our approach radically reduces the cost of enrolling new customers by connecting controllable loads through the rapidly growing set of Internet of Things (IoT) applications programming interfaces (APIs). On the electricity retailer side, our unique characterization of the thermal loads as a Virtual Battery allows operators to dispatch load in a familiar, simple, and continuously adjustable way while managing quality of service by monitoring devices’ thermal states of charge.

The commercial concept has been developed during the past year in cooperation with Oresundskraft National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA, a trade organization for 900 American utilities). RISE has been supporting our project as has a handful of other utility companies.

Our pilot is conducted in close cooperation with Oresundskraft, Jämtkraft, Tekniska Verken, Jönköping Energi and Umeå Energi (all members of Utvecklingsklustret AB).

Emulate's unique value proposition is enabled by and based on the academic research of one of the founders described here: https://news.mit.edu/2017/virtual-batteries-cheaper-cleaner-power-0324