Centrica Business Solutions has joined forces with the venturing arm of Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) to deliver industrial demand response capacity in Japan.

Tepco Ventures will use Centrica’s FlexPond™ demand side response (DSR) platform to provide flexibility services for the reserve market in the Kyushu region, which has a significant number of industrial customers and renewable energy projects connected to the power grid.

FlexPond will be delivered under a ‘software as a service’ model that allows utilities to use Centrica’s proprietary platform to build their own virtual power plants and deliver clean DSR capacity from a variety of flexible generation and demand assets. The cloud-based platform is used by over 150 of Europe’s largest energy users .

Shinji Akatsuka, President of Tesco Ventures said: “It is a great honour for TEPCO Ventures to work with Centrica, which has a proven track record in Europe. We look forward to contributing to the realisation of a low carbon society.”

Japan’s DSR capability is expected to evolve from today’s capacity-like reserves to frequency regulation and wider ancillary services by 2021.