California Municipal Electric Utility Launches Apogee Demand Exchange to Reduce Peaks.

Business Editors

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 28, 2001

Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), one of California's largest municipal electric utilities, is using Apogee Interactive's Demand Exchange(SM) Internet platform to reduce peak electric loads with its commercial and industrial customers. With SMUD's voluntary, web-based programs EnergyNet (Demand-Bid) and EnergyDirect (Direct Load Control), SMUD offers customers financial incentives in exchange for load reductions. All communication and transactions are conducted over the web and customers are given anywhere from one hour to two days to plan ahead for reduced electrical use.

Using The Demand Exchange website, EnergyNet customers review SMUD's offered price for upcoming peak periods and automatically calculate what their financial savings will be using various load reduction scenarios. If they elect to participate, they submit their pledge over the website.

"For us the key to making a curtailment program work is automation. The Demand Exchange platform lets us notify many customers simultaneously, see how they plan to respond, and streamline the process of posting bill credits associated with those customers' participation," said Harlan Coomes, program manager for SMUD.

SMUD is just one of the California utilities using The Demand Exchange. The California Energy Commission has approved The Demand Exchange as one of six key components in its Peak Load Reduction Program menu.

"The Demand Exchange offers customers an easy way to reduce costs and utilities an effective way to aggregate relatively small individual loads to achieve significant system-wide impact at enormously reduced administrative costs," said Joel Gilbert, chief executive officer of Apogee.

The number of utilities using The Demand Exchange has jumped to more than 25, including San Diego Gas & Electric Co. (NYSE: SRE), Portland General Electric, Entergy (NYSE: ETG), GPU Energy (NYSE: GPU) and Southern Company (NYSE: SO). Apogee projects the Exchange will facilitate 100,000 megawatt-hours in peak load reductions this summer and twice that amount by the end of the year.

SMUD's EnergyNet and EnergyDirect programs are a cooperative effort between SMUD, Apogee Interactive, ABB Energy Interactive Inc. and Stonewater Software.

Formed in 1994, Apogee is a leading provider of Internet solutions, web content and e-learning courseware to the energy industry. Apogee's clients include all of the major U.S. investor-owned utilities and many of the country's cooperatives and municipal systems. Company information is available at www.apogee.net.