Itron strengthens demand response portfolio with Comverge acquisition

Itron announced it has completed the acquisition of privately held Comverge by purchasing its parent company, Peak Holding for approximately $100 million.

“We are excited to add Comverge’s strong, healthy and growing business and integrate Comverge and Itron’s well-proven solutions to enable distributed energy management,” said Mark de Vere White, president of Itron’s Electricity business line.

“The growing need for utilities to meet energy efficiency regulations, enable customer choice in energy management and better optimize the use of distributed energy resources is driving a convergence between smart connected networks and demand side solutions,” de Vere White said.

Through this acquisition, we are helping our utility customers address these trends to better facilitate grid performance and reliability, reduce peak demand, drive customer engagement and save energy,” de Vere White added.

Merging Comverge’s solution with Itron’s OpenWay Riva solution will allow utilities to seamlessly connect with homes to improve operational efficiency, and distribution and energy efficiency, while allowing consumers to directly participate in managing their energy use.

Taking advantage of the real-time edge computing power of OpenWay Riva, the joint solution will enable utilities to derive more operational benefit from their demand response and distributed energy resources (DER) through more reliable network communications and real-time measurement and verification of load drop.

In addition, the solution will give utilities greater access to data and analytic power, allowing automated DER dispatch decisions, as opposed to relying on grid operators to manually make decisions. It will also help utilities with their grid planning decisions by combining Itron’s forecasting capabilities with data from end-use devices, making the forecasting process even more accurate.

The combined solution will bring new data and real-time awareness that promises to greatly enhance the consumer engagement experience. It will allow price signals to be sent to consumers in real time and enable demand charge management with real-time alerts and automated load control.  .

“With this acquisition, Itron inherits a strong demand response business with immense possibilities for growth while unlocking new opportunities by combining our joint capabilities to create new distributed energy management solutions that can seamlessly integrate into a comprehensive smart grid,” added de Vere White.

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