ACEP’s DC&M Program Visits San Francisco with Brendan Babb

Brendan Babb is in San Francisco this week to meet with industry professionals and companies to learn more about Open Data, Energy Data, Big Data workflows, Predictive Analytics and the Internet of Things. His aim is to see how they can all help ACEP grow its Data Collection and Management (DC&M) Program by getting utility and renewable energy project data online and open. He hopes to gain lessons learned information and tips for working with large quantities of energy data online and learn about the challenges of making it open and accessible to allow for a return value for the utilities that participate as the DC&M Program scales up.

A few of the groups he met with include Autogrid and Ohmconnect. At Autogrid Brendan met with representatives and discussed how the firm uses big data from smart meters to forecast demand and response and if it would work on smaller grids, such as the many that exist in rural Alaska. Ohmconnect on the other hand was able to explain to Brendan how they work on connecting with customer's smart devices like Nest and car chargers and can send out texts when there is a peak demand for people to reduce their load. In exchange for this the customers get a percentage of cash for reducing load. Their load reduction is then sold to the energy market for less than buying spinning reserve.

Other organizations Brendan met with include Code for America and 18F among others.

To learn more about ACEP’s DC&M Program, visit acep.uaf.edu/programs/data-collection-management.aspx.