AutoGrid, the leader in flexibility management software for the energy industry, announced that it has established a wholly-owned subsidiary, AutoGrid Systems KK (AutoGrid KK), in Japan. AutoGrid KK will provide direct sales and technical support to better serve the company's rapidly-expanding Japanese customer base.

"AutoGrid considers Japan one of our most important strategic regions in the world, with its swift deregulation and strong momentum toward adoption of new energy technologies," said Dr. Amit Narayan, chief executive officer of AutoGrid. "The Japanese government has mandated a near doubling of renewable energy generation by 2030. Our direct presence there will better enable our customers to leverage the virtual power plant (VPP) capabilities of AutoGrid Flex ® to integrate more renewables by aggregating, dispatching and marketing flexible energy from demand response (DR) and distributed energy resources (DERs)."

Leading AutoGrid's strategy and growth initiatives for Japan and the broader APAC region is Frederick Pugh, Representative Director. Pugh will spearhead AutoGrid's efforts to help the Japanese electricity industry incorporate new technologies in the renewable energy space, allowing it to leverage artificial intelligence to manage DERs and build new business models. Fluent in Japanese, Pugh comes to AutoGrid with leadership experience at multinational firms including Oracle, Dell EMC and TIBCO.

"Japan is one of the world's most dynamic energy markets," Pugh said. "The accelerating adoption of retail competition, deregulation, renewable energy, and behind-the-meter solar and energy storage is creating enormous opportunities along with immense technological and marketing challenges that our products solve."

AutoGrid KK represents the latest in a series of AutoGrid investments in the Japanese market. It comes on the heels of AutoGrid's partnership, announced in June, with Japanese energy services and trading company ENERES. AutoGrid software will help ENERES establish the world's largest storage VPP by asset volume. In September 2018, AutoGrid announced a partnership with Macnica, a leading Japanese supplier of networking and software products to governments and enterprise customers, to deploy its suite of energy internet applications in the Japanese market. In addition to the establishment of AutoGrid KK and its partnerships with ENERES and Macnica, AutoGrid has previously announced projects with Mitsubishi in the energy storage and virtual power plant areas. 

"As solar and storage costs continue to decline and new capacity markets open, DER and DR resources are becoming a key component of our daily operations," said Masahiro Kobayashi, President & Representative Director of ENERES. "AutoGrid Flex gives us a proven, AI-driven comprehensive distributed energy management solution that allows us to fully leverage our own DER and DR resources and those of our customers in real time."

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