Ancillary Services Coalition located in Laguna Niguel, CA, is a leading energy management and consulting

firm which has been contracted by the State of California ISO (Independent System Operator), the State's

main power grid manager, to participate in a program created to minimize and/or eliminate the need for

involuntary rotating blackouts during times when generating resources are insufficient to meet consumer

demand. This is achieved by notifying hundreds of California's largest power consumers to turn their power

down or off, when a pending overload is expected to hit the state’s power grid. Two major associations and

over two hundred and fifty individual companies are currently participating with ASC. According to ASC's

Senior Executive Vice President Gary J. Fabrizi, the amount of energy that could be saved is staggering.

"Currently, ASC has over 500MW of approved participation accepted by the ISO. At approximately 2kW

per household, our aggregation alone represents 1,000,000 homes" states Fabrizi.

The quicker these participants are contacted and are able to power down or reduce their power usage, the

more energy and money is saved by the State of California. In each power emergency, 100% of these large

power users need to be notified. Rightfully so, quick notification and confirmation had become ASC's

immediate concern. The primary methodology of e-mailing participants did not account for those which

were mobile, in the field, or were prone to be away from their desks, nor did it provide an easy way to

guarantee these individuals received the messages at all. Their secondary method of simply calling these

customers using a telephone guaranteed the message was received when they were able to contact someone,

however, the number of phone lines needed was becoming cost prohibitive, and more importantly, the time

required to make the number of phone calls was expected to take too long to complete when some rolling

blackouts were occurring as often as hourly.