Top Innovators
Juan Carlos Patiño is the Director of Customer Energy Programs at LUMA Energy. David Cruz is Program Manager at LUMA Energy.
LUMA Energy won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Mabel MacFerran Top Innovator in Energy Storage'' for its Customer Battery Energy Sharing.
PUF's Rachel Bryant: Please describe the innovation and its positive impact.
Juan Carlos Patiño: Customer Battery Energy Sharing (CBES) is a unique program because it's the first time, as far as I know, in the Caribbean — and maybe even in Latin America — that a battery demand response program has been launched at scale. What we're doing is using customer-owned batteries, installed behind the meter, to help address supply shortages.
When we call an event, participants can either disconnect from the grid and use their own stored power, or they can push power back into the system. In both cases, it reduces the strain on the grid and helps to prevent outages. It's essentially thousands of people working together to stabilize the system when it's under pressure.
Another innovative element is the DERMS platform we will be launching soon. That will streamline communication with the aggregators who work directly with customers. It will give us faster, more accurate data and make deployments more reliable.