Steffes receives 2016 Grid Edge Award
Steffes is honored to be awarded a Grid Edge Award with Greentech Media. Steffes is one of the twenty companies presented with this award for their advanced work in the area of distributed energy and grid integration.
For the past three years, Greentech Media has been highlighting some of the companies at the heart of this transformation with its Grid Edge Awards list. This year’s winners include some of the country’s biggest utilities and grid vendors, as well as behind-the-scenes technology providers and software startups, and several projects that bring utilities and third parties together in innovative ways. Awardees are nominated by and voted on by energy industry stakeholders, including the team of analysts at GTM Research.
It was about 25 years that Steffes released its first Electric Thermal Storage (ETS) space heating system that provided utilities with ‘behind the meter’ energy storage while delivering low cost heating to consumers. Major enhancements in the past 10 years have enabled these ETS devices, including domestic water heaters, to become powerful, affordable and scalable energy storage systems.
In 2014 Steffes launched the software side of its energy storage system, called “dynamic dispatch”, that aggregates and brings utility-grade telemetry and data analytics to the challenge of using thermal energy storage to help balance intermittent wind and solar energy for grid stability and reliability.
Steffes is deploying smart, “grid-interactive” space and water heaters which are proving these systems are capable of far more than traditional demand response. Multiple demonstrations have shown these ETS systems not only are very effective in storing and utilizing renewable energy, they also can provide frequency regulation and contingency reserves to mitigate the sudden loss of generation capacity.