Two Limerick firms through to final of Irish innovation Awards

By
Staff Reporter
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Attention Business/News Desks 15/6/2018 Repro Free. Electricity Exchange, the leading provider of smart grid technology and virtual power plant services on Friday announced that due to the rapid growth, the Company will now begin the process to double its workforce over the coming months. Photographed at the announcement were co-founders Duncan O’Toole(left) and Dr Paddy Finn(right) with Sean Kelly, MEP who sits on the Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) Committee, the International Trade Committee and the Fisheries Committee with some of the latest advanced power monitoring solutions. Photograph Liam Burke Press 22 The Company, co-founded by Dr. Paddy Finn and Mr. Duncan O’Toole and in which Bord na Móna took a 50% share in 2016, operate a virtual power plant from its 24hr operations centre in Limerick. Electricity Exchange offers a virtual power plant service, which pays large electricity consumers to make excess energy available to the grid when its required. Their ground-breaking hardware and software ecosystem is capable of remotely reducing electricity demand on the sites of hundreds of large electricity consumers, either by turning on existing back-up generators or by shutting down non-essential processes for short periods, to make their power available to other users on the electricity system. This achieves the same net effect as a conventional power power plant with the added benefits of being faster, more scalable and less costly and carbon intensive to deploy.

The Irish Innovation Awards nominees have been announced with two Limerick businesses making it to the final.

Electricity Exchange and Farmhedge are among the fifteen finalists from established companies and start-ups which have been nominated.

Electricity Exchange, which is based in Plassey, is a Limerick start-up which has developed a fast-acting control and metering system to maximise the revenues which can be earned from Eir-Grid’s DS3 System Services programme.

This product is designed to meter, detect and respond to frequency deviations on the national grid at speeds nearly three times faster than the fastest rate of response required by EirGrid. For its customers the system maximises the reward for being on standby to resolve frequency deviations on the grid.

Farmhedge, which is based in UL, has been nominated in the IT and Fintech category for building a technology platform that enables fast and personalised communication across the agriculture supply chain. Transactions are initiated either on the supply side or demand side and create distinct economic benefits for farmers and the companies they work with.

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For the Awards, three finalists are nominated in five different categories with the category winners going forward to compete for the overall Innovation of the Year Award. The winners will be announced at a high-profile awards ceremony at the RDS in Dublin on November 5th.

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