Rural North Carolina will soon be home to one of the country's most advanced and dynamic smart grid platforms, thanks to the latest evolution of a partnership between North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation (NCEMC) and OATI, a global leader in energy technology solutions.

MINNEAPOLIS, Feb. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ --To meet the growing challenges to power grid reliability and resilience, NCEMC is enhancing its deployment of OATI's distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) to feature real-time flexibility, orchestration, and control.

With OATI's evolution to real-time DERMS, utilities can manage the power grid based on planning, forecasts, and current system conditions.

"With each enhancement to our DERMS, we drive innovative solutions to reshape our electric grid with the network of resources and technologies used to produce and deliver electricity," said Lee Ragsdale, Senior Vice President of Strategic Projects. "Once this project is successfully deployed, it will help us to build a brighter future for our members and communities."

NCEMC, working with 26 locally-owned distribution cooperatives in North Carolina, currently uses OATI DERMS and GridMind^® microgrid controls to seamlessly manage a wide array of DER assets, including solar, battery storage, and demand response programs, as well as multiple, islandable microgrid sites. The latest enhancement to the OATI DERMS platform will enable real-time orchestration — an industry-defining advancement for utilities.

"For years, OATI and NCEMC have collaborated to deploy some of the most advanced smart grid tools in the world— each serving the goal of providing more reliable service to the people of North Carolina," said Sasan Mokhtari, OATI's president and CEO. "We are bringing industry-defining, real-time control capabilities into NCEMC's existing OATI DERMS platform."

Now ubiquitous among electric utilities around the world, OATI pioneered DERMS, launching the industry's first DERMS platform in collaboration with Kansas Power & Light (now Evergy) in 2009. Since then, OATI has remained the most-deployed DERMS with more than 225 utilities currently utilizing the OATI DERMS platform. Additionally, more cooperative utilities, including 11 of the 60 G&Ts in the U.S., use OATI DERMS than any other solution.

In recent years, DERMS has emerged as a critical tool for utilities charged with maintaining reliable and resilient power grids. These systems are the key enabler of the energy transition— uniting DERs to utility control rooms to energy markets. OATI is the only energy solutions provider with the experience, functionality, and scale to support power systems operations from meters to markets, combatting the operational silos that have plagued utilities for far too long.

"Managing the power grid to meet customer expectations for reliability and resilience has never been more challenging," Mokhtari said. "OATI's pioneering work on real-time DERMS is a game-changer for an industry that possesses zero margin for failure. At OATI, our mission remains to provide the tools utilities need today while equipping them for the future. Our ongoing partnership with NCEMC exemplifies that innovative spirit, and we can't wait to see what comes next."

ABOUT OATI

Energy is all we do. From bulk energy markets to community microgrids, OATI serves every segment of the energy industry with essential technologies and services. At our core, we're power systems engineers building better ways to move electrons across the grid.

We were the first company to provide large-scale software-as-a-service to the energy industry, and we pioneered the bulk power and DERMS markets. Today, we continue to push the energy frontier with cloud-based grid solutions and energy-native generative AI. Without compromising on security – for 30+ years, our private servers have safeguarded the energy industry's data.

OATI was founded in 1995 by world-renowned power systems engineer Dr. Sasan Mokhtari, PhD. Privately owned for more than 30 years, OATI is an engineering-first organization that prides itself on leading the industry's most robust research and development team, free from the pressure of venture capitalists and institutional investors.

Learn more by visiting OATI.com or by contacting communications@oati.net.

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SOURCE Open Access Technology International, Inc. (OATI)