Media and Appearances
September 21, 2022
Amy Simpkins presented a panel presentation on “Defining Resilience” as part of the RE+ Tech conference in Anaheim, California.
July 15, 2022
Amy Simpkins was a panelist for a Grid Resilience Career Talk hosted by the Berkeley Lab K-12 program, LBNL Next.
April 12, 2022
Amy Simpkins co-hosted an “energy storage field trip” for Berkeley Lab with partner Dan Wiggins from the Bad River Tribe, featuring Bad River’s Ishkonige Nawadide microgrid projects.
January 27, 2022
Amy Simpkins presented an introductory Microgrids 101 session for RENEW Wisconsin‘s annual Renewable Energy Summit.
October 8, 2021
Amy Simpkins gave “The Case For Microgrids” at the Energy & Environment Symposium at University of Northern Colorado.
September 23, 2021
Amy Simpkins appeared on episode 402 of the SunCast podcast.
July 22, 2021
Amy Simpkins presented on Resilience Performance of Solar + Storage for the Clean Energy Group / Clean Energy States Alliance webinar series episode on The Bad River Band Microgrid: Solar+Storage as a Tool for Tribal Energy Sovereignty and Resilience. Amy’s presentation begins at 54:00.
July 15, 2021
Dr. Travis Simpkins presented on net metering principles at the Microgrid Corporation lunch webinar series, on Microgrid Community Adoption.
October 30, 2018
Dr. Travis Simpkins joined Tim Montague of Continental Electrical and Solar Works for Illinois for a webinar on Maximizing your Solar Investment with Battery Energy Storage.
September 5, 2018
In anticipation of her presentation at the Distributed Energy Conference in October, Amy Simpkins spoke to POWER Magazine‘s Aaron Larson on the POWER Podcast about the knobs that utilities can turn to find a win-win situation with their clients when it comes to behind-the-meter distributed energy resources.
June 27, 2018
Dr. Travis Simpkins joins Geoff Oxnam from American Microgrid Solutions on the Clean Energy Group Resilient Power webinar series to discuss Resilient Power in Practice: Lessons Learned from the Field. Watch the webinar here.
June 25, 2018
Dr. Travis Simpkins explains why utilities adopt Time of Use (TOU) pricing for Is time of use pricing fair? with Choose Energy.
Dr. Travis Simpkins, CTO of muGrid Analytics, a company that provides techno-economic analysis of energy projects to developers, utilities, and component manufacturers, argues that demand charges are even better for customers than the standard utility pricing model. “The reality is that utilities are already paying real time prices… A flat-rate tariff as has existed for decades is really just an average of this real-time price over the course of the year. So, in fact, it is not fair to consumers — if somebody uses electricity at night to dry their clothes when it is cheap, they should pay less for their electricity that than their neighbor who is running their AC at 6 PM. TOU pricing allows for that.”
By charging customers more for their energy during peak hours, utilities can reward consumers who limit their energy usage during those times. And, by limiting customers’ energy consumption, time-of-use pricing can actually alleviate some of the harmful effects that running the power grid have on the environment.
Time-of-use pricing also helps utilities begin the transition to “the utility of the future.” Dr. Simpkins explains, “In a world where most houses have solar, batteries, and other technologies, the utility will be more of a grid operator, rather than energy supplier.” The switch to TOU pricing allows utilities to prepare for a future in which consumers are their own suppliers.
June 13, 2018
Dr. Travis Simpkins presents “Optimizing Battery Sizing to Maximize Economic Return” at the meeting of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society.
May 17, 2018
Amy Simpkins discussed the impact of distributed energy resources with Choose Energy for What is the future of utilities?
Amy Simpkins, CEO of Golden, CO-based muGrid Analytics, which uses high-level math to address problems at the intersection of energy technology and economics, expresses the situation a bit differently. “It’s not so much that there is a decline in demand as there has been a rise in distributed generation, particularly behind-the-meter distributed generation,” Simpkins says. “The rise of solar power over the past decade along with the rise in battery energy storage that we are currently seeing is causing ripples for utilities.”
The whole model is changing, Simpkins says. “It’s more than a blip. Energy consumers are starting to produce a non-trivial portion of the energy that they consume, offsetting the demand on the grid. We are seeing the rise of the prosumer – energy consumers who produce energy as well as consume it.”
May 7, 2018
Dr. Travis Simpkins discussed the future of energy and microgrids on Today, Tomorrow’s Technologies with host Jose Negron. Listen to the podcast here.
February 1, 2018
Amy Simpkins is featured in Energy Resources Bring Benefits, Challenges and New Opportunities by POWER Magazine.
The really interesting [thing] for the future is in dispatchable assets,” Amy Simpkins, CEO of muGrid Analytics, a Colorado-based company that helps clients who invest in renewable energy, told POWER. “Solar has come of age in the last 10 years. Storage today is where solar was 10 years ago. The dispatchability aspect introduces a whole new level of complexity. What we’re looking at is control of those assets. From the utility side, meeting peak loads, predictive analytics. With solar, there is some predictive analytics, such as when is the weather going to be bad.
“Simple net metering was designed for small residential customers. Net metering is phasing out, with the complex marketplace. New York [state] is totally getting out of net metering, moving to VDER [value of DERs],” with a VDER Value Stack Calculator, developed to provide an accurate estimate of a PV project’s compensation under the Value Stack. ‘‘We’re doing a project behind the meter in Ohio, [in] the PJM market, [where] our customer is looking at targeting peak hours, peak demand, to put energy back on the grid. Focusing on the day-ahead market, putting predictive analytics to work.
November 6, 2017
Dr. Travis Simpkins discusses the Future of Microgrids on the Suncast podcast with Nico Johnson. Listen here.