Spirae LLC

Spirae, LLC provides comprehensive distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS) for utilities and real-time microgrid controls. Based in Fort Collins, Colorado, Spirae has developed, refined and validated its control platform and its menu of market-driven applications through numerous full scale and pilot projects in North America and Europe since 2002.

Spirae’s expertise has developed through application of many decades’ aggregate team experience in power systems analysis, controls, engineering, and software design. Spirae’s Wave® control platform provides a dynamically scalable architecture for integrating and managing high levels of renewable and distributed energy resources (DER) at the edge of the grid.

Spirae anticipates that distributed energy resources (DER) will play an ever larger role in the generation and management of electricity for customers all over the world. Spirae includes in the definition of DER, renewable generation sources such as wind and PV; energy storage devices such as flywheels, ice, and batteries; and controllable loads such as water heaters and HVAC systems. To manage these DER to respond to facility and system needs, a robust communications and control solution is needed.

Spirae’s Wave® control software platform was designed with exactly that purpose in mind – to be the operating system of DER. Spirae’s foundation in industrial controls, combined with an experienced team of power systems engineers, lays the ground for a software platform that is not only highly intelligent and functional, but also fast to deploy, scalable and flexible to implement new applications to drive business cases that emerge with the evolving marketplace. Spirae’s software platform makes use of processes that operate at three distinct levels to create a distributed and federated network of DER – the device level, the aggregation level, and the system level. Spirae’s Wave software uses standard industrial protocols, such as DNP3 and Modbus, to communicate with devices; or can interface via a Web Service. Communication between Wave software processes is over a secure middleware. The Wave software exchanges information as needed with enterprise level data systems such as SCADA and DMS.

Spirae has pioneered IoT-electric grid projects with up to 60 MW of DER under control and demonstrated functionality using the DER such as islanding, high renewable integration and frequency regulation, and market interface. With 15 years of experience in the field, Spirae is uniquely qualified as the provider of the DER Operating System.