REGEN and Fat Spaniel connect on energy management
Monday, March 23rd, 2009There’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…)
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca