Bridgeway: Reducing Demand to Save Energy, Costs and Promote RE

As many people know, renewable energy is now far cheaper energy from fossil fuels, but due to their variable nature, firm capacity is still required (for more details, please see my previous article). Though energy storage is cheaper than coal, it is still more expensive than demand response-dynamic control of load to reduce the "peakiness" of load.

Today's Start-Up, Bridgeway Power, is seeking to bring demand response to India. Though Demand Response is quite common abroad, one of the challenges (and opportunities) for Bridgeway is tailoring their solutions to the Indian context. Founder Arshi Chadha is actually a previous founder of a solar rooftop company Bridgeway Power and when monitoring the solar production from their sites, they realized many of their customers also found value in monitoring demand as well. For example, by seeing how demand rose after ACs were serviced they realized many customers (especially in the heavily polluted Delhi) needed their ACs serviced more often to improve effficency. Bridgeway, including cofounder Kushal Likhi are now working on a pilot with a township to control heating/cooling load.

Bridgeway is developing a number of temperature, motion and other sensors to optimize heating and cooling loads as well as control EV charging. For example, a single-phase consumer in Delhi can only use up to 10 kVA before an upgrade is required. Controlling when the EV is charging (eg. during solar hours, or slowing it down in non-solar/peak hours) can ensure EV owners stay under this limit. Bridgeway is developing the "Trillectric" ecosystem, a suite of sensors and controllers to provide a "virtual power plant". Trillectric is a specialized hardware suite optimized for grandular energy tracking nad proactive control, integrated with an LLM to predict and adapt to the nuances of energy usage. It is particularly transformative for high-demand applications like heating, cooling and EV charging. Furthermore, it provides aggregators with real-time data through APIs, empowering DISCOM operators to manage the peak load, reducing the need for expensive new peaking capacity.

Ideally smart devices (for residential, commercial or industrial applications) can adjust their usage based directly on signals from the DISCOM (I discussed the EV case more here). In a city like Delhi the top 10% of load (800 MW) may only be used <10% of the year. This means a new gas or coal plant may be built just for 800 hours a year-which is incredibly expensive! A virtual power plant as envisioned by Bridgeway can instead shift that load to high solar/wind or off-peak hours, saving the capex of thermal plants (or battery storage).

Though I am super excited about companies like Bridgeway bringing demand response to India, I am also impressed with their practical, down-to-earth style of focusing on hardway solutions that are needed today, such as low-cost sensors and controllers for ACs and EV charge controllers that are more affordable for the Indian market. They have also developed an AI engine to help provide insights to consumers, allowing them to save money today (such as in the unserviced AC example).

If India's peak load can be shaved by just 10% using Demand Response, this can save 250,000-300,000 Crore in Capex (if demand response is used for peak capacity instead of the new planned coal plants). Companies like Brideway are crucial to making this a reality and in the mean time they are already saving thousands if not Lakhs for consumers today.