Varentec was acquired and has been folded into Sentient Energy's sensor and software suite to create an end-to-end solutions provider for distribution grid management needs

See Sentient Energy

Vaentec develops volt-VAR power electronics to manage feeder power quality for municipal, cooperative, and investor-owned utilities. The company's product offers grid-edge Volt-VAR control to utilities, installed on the customer side of a distribution service transformer.

The device measures voltage at a higher resolution than most AMI systems and injects VAR to regulate it, reducing voltage volatility on a feeder particularly in areas with a high penetration of intermittent renewables. This enables increased renewable deployment while improving grid efficiency and power quality. The product can also reduce peak demand by up to 6% through applying conservation voltage reduction and extend the lifetime of load tap changer, line voltage regulators, switched capacitor banks, and other transformer assets by reducing demand for them.

Varentec's ENGO+GEMS product is a hardware plus software solution. The ENGO-V10 is a 10 kVAR Volt-VAR device installed on the customer-side of the transformer that independently measures and regulates voltage on the feeder over a 15 year lifetime. GEMS is a web-based software platform that provides real-time visibility to voltage states and control of the ENGO devices.

Pricing is set per deployment where the key consideration is the scale of the deployment and the number of end-points.

• Grid edge device monitors voltage at 32 samples per cycle and injects VAR at sub-cycles to regulate voltage
• Management software provides visibility at the device-level for voltage monitoring and control for voltage set point dispatch

• Power quality improvement reduce voltage volatility on feeder lines, improving efficiency and reducing ANSI-A violations
• Peak demand management provides conservative voltage reduction to reduce peak demand
• PV deployment support manages problems like voltage drop that result from intermittent PV systems
• Grid monitoring and visibility enables real-time visibility of voltage states on the feeder level