Centrica Business Solutions and TEPCO join forces to support decarbonisation of 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.