Back in 2014, we covered the launch of Demansys, a demand response company spun out of assets acquired from CPower, and promising software that could automate and optimize big commercial and industrial loads for big energy opportunities. Two years later, Demansys has itself been acquired, though it's hard to say whether it's grown much in the intervening period.
Tarsier Ltd., a pink-sheets-traded, New York-based energy services company, reported last week that it “will acquire certain intellectual property assets and contracts from Demansys,” including what sounds like all of its substantial contracts with Alcoa, Consolidated Edison, and a street-lighting project in Kazakhstan, among others.
Tarsier will also acquire the IP behind Demansys’ Grid Daemon software platform, which company chairman Jeff Lines described in 2014 as a combination of utility-grade distributed SCADA and cloud-based data analysis and prediction. Grid Daemon’s specialty was connecting big industrial loads to frequency regulation and ancillary services markets, but it was also doing more coarse day-ahead demand reduction and load shifting, with large-scale projects in New York and Singapore.
Lines said the New Milford, Conn.-based company was bidding an aggregated 75 megawatts of flexible load into the New York Independent System Operator’s frequency regulation market, as well as having more projects in the works. The company also pushed mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM to consider rules for allowing energy storage as capacity -- an important new growth market for batteries and other energy storage systems to grow beyond the lucrative, yet limited, frequency regulation market.
But Demansys hasn’t announced any big projects in the past two years. It also faces tough competition from rivals like Enbala, Blue Pillar, Viridity, Innovari, or the recently acquired Powerit Solutions, which are also aggregating big loads for ultra-fast flexibility. Demand response companies like EnerNOC and Converge are also encroaching on this territory, as are energy services companies like Honeywell, Schneider Electric, Siemens and Johnson Controls/Tyco.
Tarsier Ltd. was formerly known as Huayue Electronics, and it still uses the symbol HUAY in over-the-counter trading, where it was valued at 58 cents per share as of midday Thursday. It has offices in New York City, Hong Kong and Kazakhstan, and it is “in the process of acquiring the assets of several companies in the energy sector,” according to its website.
“Once completed, these acquisitions will give Tarsier...over 6,000 commercial and residential energy customers who are currently purchasing electric and/or natural gas from the targeted companies." Demansys CEO William May is now president of innovation at Tarsier.
Tarsier CEO Isaac H. Sutton has previously been chief executive at LED bulb manufacturer SavWatt and text messaging platform provider GoIP Global, and company president Daniel Major has led Northeast retail energy providers including Major Energy, Family Energy and Summit Energy.