I mentioned back in July that Regen Energy of Toronto was in talks with a California utility about testing its “swarm logic” technology for the managing of electric-car charging loads on the local grid. At the DistribuTECH conference in San Diego the company announced the utility as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has an ongoing Smart Grid EV integration prjoect funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Regen says California utilities have serious concerns about the potential for rapid deployment of EVs to overwhelm their local distribution assets, largely because city’s such as Los Angeles are likely to have relatively higher concentrations of EV owners. That is, green-minded California consumers tend to be early adopters of these technologies.

“Our EnviroGrid technology platform has been proven widely for commercial HVAC demand management and demand response applications,” according to Regen chief executive Tim Angus. “HVAC often represents 60 per cent of total building load, however the emerging adoption of EVs will quickly place significant stress on the grid both from a building and city level.”

There’s a buzz around Toronto-based REGEN Energy these days, the company that uses “swarm logic” to manage the energy use of large appliances in buildings that cycle on and off. REGEN’s EnviroGrid devices, when several are attached to appliances scattered throughout a building, communicate with each other wirelessly and figure out amongst themselves — without any central control — which ones should turn on and which should turn off to minimize a large electricity consumer’s overall peak load. There’s little, if any, human intervention. That said, humans can intervene by taking control of the devices in a demand-response scenario to turn down load. For this reason, REGEN’s technology is both a load management and a demand response tool.

Anyway, at the GreenNet ’09 conference REGEN announced this evening it has partnered up with Fat Spaniel, which has a renewable-energy monitoring application, called the Insight Platform, that is gaining industry momentum. (more…)