Insights Success The 10 Fastest Growing Utilities and Energy Solutions Provider Companies

The 10 Fastest Growing
UTILITIES
and
ENERGY
Solutions Provider Companies
scalable, GridOS applications provide
powerful grid management capabilities
to unlock greater potential for
distributed energy resources, including
renewable generation, energy storage
and responsive demand, while
seamlessly integrating with existing
utility data systems. GridOS also
facilitates the management of
microgrids from homes and
communities to utility scale for
unparalleled resiliency and value to the
empowered electricity customer.
Smart Grid Pioneer
Joshua Wong, President and CEO of
Opus One has led Opus One from a
one-man consulting business in 2012
to landing a 13-million CAD project
with the Government of Canada a year
after incorporating, to now leading a
$16.4 M CAD multi-utility North
American transactive energy network
project. Joshua’s smart grid focus
started by founding Toronto Hydro’s
smart grid department. While working
at Toronto Hydro, Joshua noticed the
emerging challenges and opportunities
of integrating an increasing number of
customer-sited distributed energy
resources with traditional utility
distribution systems.
Joshua Wong
President and CEO
Joshua is a licensed Professional
Engineer in the Province of Ontario.
He holds a degree in Electrical
Engineering from the University of
Toronto, Masters of Electric Power
Engineering from the University of
Waterloo, and completed executive
programs from MIT Sloan, IMD
Business School and Harvard Business
School.
Breakthroughs
Opus One’s founding mission was to
create a real-time distributed
intelligence platform that could
integrate DERs and distribution
automation capabilities, with real time
model-based power flow optimization
as its core funcationality. As the team
looked at multiple state-of-the-art
commercial tools to build upon, it
found that these tools fell short of the
desired performance requirements. The
team discovered that the missing piece
was a robust, real-time distribution
system state estimation (DSSE) engine
- one that could go beyond traditional
power flow methods and converge
under the most complex power flow
scenarios. Thus, the company recruited
a team of PhDs to go back to the first
principles of grid modeling and spent
two years developing an efficient and
powerful approach to DSSE that uses
non-linear programming
optimization techniques and interior
point optimizers to drive the
mathematical libraries that compute
Jacobians, Hessians, Legrangians and
optimization algorithms.
Opus One achieved a breakthrough
in DSSE in 2014 with a debut of
GridOS as the industry’s first realtime,
model-based system for
managing and optimizing the
complex nature of DERs and grid
topologies.
Identifying Needs of Utilities
Opus One is forward looking. They
seek to partner with utilities to
identify their needs and anticipate
their future pain points and
opportunities around grid
management, customer service and
business model innovations. Their
solution enables the future electricity
grid and they partner with other
innovative technology companies.
GridOS incorporates unique
technology and intelligence that is used
as a base for additional development
and functionality that is guided by the
challenges and trends that customers
are experiencing. The firm has coupled
its vision with these emerging trends of
the modern grid to drive the direction
of solutions.
Opus One is at the leading edge of
providing a technology solution to
enable transactive energy markets. The
team creates win-win scenarios for
utilities and their customers by
enabling a buy and sell energy market
at the distribution level.
Opus One is growing rapidly, in part
due to recent funding from utility
backed investment fund Energy Impact
Partners and global energy services
firm, ENGIE. Opus One has opened its
first U.S. office at the Urban Future
Lab, NYU Tandon, ACRE to engage
with utilities in New York State that are
focused on NY REV the State’s plan to
reform their energy vision.
Expected Excellence with National
Grid
National Grid has selected Opus One
to develop the first field demonstration
of a distributed system platform (DSP),
which will integrate distributed energy
resources from the Buffalo Niagara
Medical Campus (BNMC) with
National Grid’s local electricity
distribution system. Opus One will
partner with National Grid over the
course of the next two years on all
aspects of the DSP demonstration,
from financial modeling to the design,
commissioning and operation of a realtime
DSP market. The DSP will
communicate the electric distribution
system needs of the grid, and in
parallel generate potential revenue and
investment opportunities for BNMC
member institutions with DER
capabilities. The project is aimed at
demonstrating the future of the
electricity grid, where customers have
a greater role in how they use energy.
|NOVEMBER 2016
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