Power utility getting boost from U.K. software firm

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Saint John Energy’s CEO says a new partnership with a U.K. software firm will lead to more efficient, greener energy at peak times.

The municipally owned energy utility received $2.57 million in federal funding from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Saint John-Rothesay MP Wayne Long announced Friday. Along with $856,000 from Saint John Energy, the money will fund innovation projects including a “utility operating system” in partnership with London-based Kraken Technologies.

“Saint John Energy is a jewel in our province. We are lucky to have our own utility in our city that shows so much innovation,” Long told reporters, saying it helps Canada work towards its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Saint John Energy also has a Zero30 plan to achieve that target by 2030.

CEO Ryan Mitchell told reporters the utility currently licenses around four to five internal software systems that are “effectively obsolete.” He said Kraken’s platform “does it all” in one operating system, “dramatically simplifying” the service delivery for customers and support staff.

Lily Stein, Kraken’s VP of customer success for North America, said that Saint John Energy is “forward-thinking” on innovation, including smart pumps and the Tesla Megapack battery installation, but “the systems have been limiting.”

“We see that so often with so many utilities,” Stein said. “They have the vision but they can’t execute because they’re tied in a spaghetti soup of systems, and that’s the problem which Kraken is trying to solve.”

One of the benefits of Kraken’s platform is “managing peak and demand response,” Mitchell said, meaning how the utility manages its use of stored energy to reduce its need for extra juice at peak times.

“Kraken as a platform has the ability to look at … devices we have in our system that are able to be charged and discharge,” he said. “It helps optimize that against our peak.”

The utility buys wholesale energy through NB Power, with a portion of its bill coming from “demand” expenses, or the high-water mark of energy used for a 15-minute span, Mitchell said.

“There is a pretty significant financial incentive for us to reduce it, but there’s also a significant climate incentive,” said Mitchell, saying peak energy emissions are two times that of off-peak energy.

He said the utility realized $1.8 million in savings through demand response last year, but there’s “still some fish in the pond” for further reductions. Mitchell said that the savings used would go to improving its costs figures, but would not have an impact on rates.

Stein said the way customers would likely experience this include quicker response time in customer service and more information about a customer’s energy use.

“Currently, when you call up your utility, the person on the other end of the phone is going to be looking at 11 different screens and copy and pasting,” she said. “Kraken will … make that experience a lot easier and hopefully empower customers to do a lot of cool stuff themselves.”

Kraken Technologies spun off from Octopus Energy Group, which Stein said was a utility founded to test-drive the software that it’s now taking to market, with clients in the U.K., Australia and Japan. This partnership would be the firm’s entry to the North American market, the announcement heard.

A team of a dozen Kraken staff are in Saint John this week working on deployment, and Stein said they’re targeting next summer to have the programs up and running.

Mitchell said the partnership is one of the “innovations initiatives” the utility is undertaking with the $3.4 million in new investment, one of which is a “digital twin” of its grid infrastructure, according to a press release. He didn’t clarify how much of the funding goes to the Kraken partnership, or how many other projects are in the pipeline.

“There’s a lot of interest in terms of what we’re doing around innovation, there’s a lot of folks that would like to work with us,” he said. “We’re always looking for ways, how can we continue to leverage our innovation to our customers as well as advance climate action?”