MELBOURNE, April 24, 2020 – Future Grid, developer of proprietary Smart Grid software that has been successfully implemented in electricity utilities across Australia, announced today that they will be entering the U.S. energy market. Future Grid aims to help U.S. utilities mitigate grid impacts caused by the transition to renewable energy by providing unprecedented visibility of their distribution networks compared to existing utility systems. Using Future Grid, U.S. utilities are able to feed their Integrated Distribution Planning process with high-resolution smart meter data that will result in a safer and more reliable distribution network.
Over the past five years, Future Grid has been globally recognized as one of the world's best and most innovative new energy start-ups, including winning the Australian Technologies Competition, the Australian Utility Week's Best Start-up Award, and being recently listed in Cleantech Group's 2019 APAC 25.
The Melbourne-based tech company currently serves a number of Australian utilities such as AusNet Services, Western Power, United Energy, and SA Power Networks and has expanded to New Zealand with WEL Networks. Strong interest in South East Asia recently led to engagement with utilities in Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Future Grid's platform already manages 2x more transactions than Google per day, with 8 billion daily transactions occurring.
After years of software development and finetuning their product with utilities in Australia, Future Grid is entering the U.S. energy market with the support of the Australian Federal Government to work with energy utilities across the country and take their vision of a decarbonized grid global.
"The US is a natural market for Future Grid," says Chris Law, co-founder and CEO. "Although they are at a different stage of renewable integration when compared to Australia, our job, as I see it, is to package this knowledge and support U.S. utilities to derisk their Grid Modernization proposals. There are over 100 million smart meters deployed in the U.S. yet few realize the true value – that is how this can be converted to visibility for faster outage recovery or greater safety and reliability. The U.S. secondary distribution network is also the wild-west, typically un-mapped, making it harder for accurate Distribution Planning and outage restoration. Our software solves this problem and then turns this new visibility into real-time outcomes proven in Australia where we have a high degree of renewables already. "
This announcement comes just weeks after Future Grid was named a finalist in the 2020 Free Electrons Program – in which both American Electric Power (AEP) and TEPCO in Japan are members. Selected from over 850 companies globally, this ensures that their technology will be deployed to a number of global utilities during 2020 and 2021.