ZOME’s Consortium wins Department of Energy 3-year $3.2M program pioneering new DSM markets

The Stochastic Market Auction Redesigned Trading System (SMARTS), awarded to ZOME from the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Program, will develop a stochastic two-stage auction design architecture for wholesale energy markets and provide intelligent energy-portfolio risk management analytical tools that enable flexible demand assets to offer their flexibility as demand reserves. In the project, we’ll also conduct market simulation and pre-pilot tests to demonstrate the developed system in the real-time energy and reserve markets of PJM. ZOME is tasked to develop Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) by transforming buildings into grid assets (i.e. physical power plants) and offering aggregated demand capacity into the PJM market. ZOME is at the center of the energy transition to a sustainable, decentralized model dominated by new DER assets at the edge of the grid as presented in the figure below:

This project, which will become a ZOME product offered to the market at some point, will develop and demonstrate a novel, state-of-the-art auction system for next-generation energy assets. It will do this via a stochastic two-stage auction redesign for co-optimized wholesale real-time energy and reserve markets. Moreover, we’ll couple the system with intelligent energy-portfolio risk management tools that enable flexible demand assets (air conditioners, water heaters, rooftop solar, EV chargers, energy storage, etc.) to offer their flexibility into these markets as demand reserves.

ZOME is ideally positioned with its product platform, experienced team, and the recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission order 2222 to quantify the risk of delivery of demand asset energy-portfolios by implementing aggregate supply offers of demand assets and offering these offers in the PJM wholesale energy market.