

Centrica Business Solutions and TEPCO join forces to support decarbonisation of Japanese grid
Centrica’s distributed energy and power business, Centrica Business Solutions, has joined forces with the venturing arm of Japan’s largest power company, TEPCO, to deliver industrial demand response capacity for the Japanese grid.
From 1st April, TEPCO Ventures (TEPCO) will use Centrica Business Solutions’ award-winning FlexPond™ Demand Side Response (DSR) platform to provide the Transmission System Operator with flexibility services for the Reserve market in the Kyushu region, which has a significant number of both industrial customers and renewable energy projects connected to the power grid.
The deal will see Centrica deliver FlexPond™ under an innovative commercial ‘software as a service’ model that allows utilities to use Centrica’s proprietary platform to build their own virtual power plants (VPPs) and deliver clean demand side response capacity from a variety of flexible generation and demand assets. The cloud-based platform is currently used by over 150 of Europe’s largest energy users and has won awards for its capabilities in high-value reserve markets that require a response in under a second.