Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) announced today a $100 million transaction as part of its new advanced power grid platform, Resilia, focused on making electric systems bidirectional, transactive and distributed. The transaction includes a $20 million investment in OhmConnect and an $80 million commitment to finance North America''s largest distributed clean power plant, Resi-Station.
The 550-MW Resi-Station project will be funded by SIP and developed in partnership with OhmConnect and will comprise hundreds of thousands of actively engaged customers with a fleet of in-home smart devices delivering targeted energy reductions, orchestrated by technology that predicts, incentivizes and coordinates residential energy use. The funding of the project commitment is subject to customary regulatory approvals. At full scale, Resi-Station will likely be the largest residential virtual power plant in the world.
The commitment of SIP''s capital will significantly expand OhmConnect''s ability to pay California residents who conserve energy by turning off the air conditioning unit or unplugging major appliances during peak stress, helping to avert blackouts and lowering consumer costs. At scale, Resi-Station could provide 5 GWh of energy conservation, five-times what OhmConnect provided this past August, equal to the full amount of the energy shortfall in this year''s blackouts.
Because energy use can be shaped through distributed resources like rooftop solar, smart devices and electric vehicle batteries, it is now possible for connected residences to leverage IoT to scale electricity consumption up or down to stabilize the power grid. This constellation of technology and tools allows for improved energy efficiency and the ability to build a power grid that''s responsive to 21st century needs.
In addition to its $80 million commitment to Resi-Station, SIP led OhmConnect''s Series C capital raise, investing $20 million in OhmConnect. The Series C investment and Resi-Station commitment represent the SIP Resilia platform''s first major transaction. The Resilia platform will develop and scale technology and infrastructure innovations as global energy grids shift from centralized power to distributed, sustainable solutions. The funding will help advance OhmConnect''s interactive energy efficient technology and improve the resilience of power grids by bringing more customers onto its platform, thus increasing its ability to provide demand response resources to the grid, and furthering its mission of achieving a clean energy future.
In order to scale up Resi-Station and provide savings to California residents, SIP and OhmConnect are partnering with manufacturers of connected and secure home devices and plan to offer free smart thermostats to hundreds of thousands of participants in the OhmConnect software program enabling Resi-Station.
"SIP believes that energy grids must be modernized in order to orchestrate distributed energy resources," said Jonathan Winer, co-CEO of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners. "With this distributed clean power plant, Resi-Station, we are rethinking the structure of modern power grids, allowing them to function more like a symphony than a solo – a sequence of energy-taking and energy-giving systems that communicate and cooperate with one another to deliver electricity safely, cheaply, and efficiently."
OhmConnect, on behalf of Resi-Station, will provide a tech-forward user experience that will incentivize customers to reduce their electricity consumption via real-time communication prompts. For instance, a customer may receive a text asking her to adjust her thermostat for a few hours in exchange for a reward payment, offering upside to the customer, the power grid itself, and the environment. Through Resi-Station, SIP and OhmConnect plan to scale this approach to reach thousands of California homes, with customers rewarded for delivering energy savings.
"OhmConnect has shown that by linking together the savings of many individual consumers, we can reduce stress on the grid and help prevent blackouts," said OhmConnect CEO Cisco DeVries. "This investment by SIP will allow us to bring the rewards of energy savings to hundreds of thousands of additional Californians – and at the same time build the smart energy platform of the future."
The launch of Resi-Station is an example of SIP''s mission to identify, finance, and scale the technologies that will define the future of infrastructure. SIP plans to launch similar projects that engage distributed energy resources in an innovative way across the nation, using Resi-Station as a template. The company recently launched Cavnue to build the roads of the future for connected autonomous vehicles.
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati represented OhmConnect in the transaction.
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Industry players in California are planning to create a 550 MW distributed clean power plant, based off a network of hundreds of thousands of California homes and the millions of smart devices within. The power plant will serve both as a model for the clean energy grid of the future, as well as a way to reduce the risk of blackouts next summer, according to OhmConnect CEO Cisco DeVries.
Meanwhile, Southern California Edison has signed contracts for an additional 590 MW of battery energy storage in a bid to boost electric system reliability, bringing the amount of battery storage it has procured to more than 2 GW, the utility announced Monday.
"It''s paramount that we achieve full reliability," California Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild said at a press conference announcing the virtual power plant Monday, especially given the state''s push to electrify vehicles, rails and buildings, now that 40 cities in the state have adopted some form of an electrification preference or mandate for new construction.
The focus on bolstering grid reliability in California comes in light of the possibility of capacity shortfalls over the next few years, as well as rolling blackouts that affected the state this August during a record-breaking heatwave.
The state is taking a number of actions to promote reliability, Hochschild said, including a tenfold increase in the amount of energy storage going online next year, new efficiency and load management standards and procuring more clean energy resources.
"There''s not one silver bullet here — it''s really silver buckshot," Hochschild said, adding that the planned distributed clean power plant is an important piece of that.
SCE''s storage procurements are also part of a broader reliability solution.
SCE kicked off a bid for system reliability resources last year following a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) decision requiring the utility to procure nearly 1.2 GW of capacity that could come online between 2021 and 2023. The utility''s own analysis has indicated that the state needs to add 30 GW of utility-scale storage and 10 GW of distributed storage to meet its carbon goals.
Earlier this year, SCE announced plans to procure a package of battery resources totaling 770 MW/3,080 MWh, as part of that effort to address potential capacity shortfalls in the state, especially as several gas plants are slated to retire over the next few years.
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