ASHRAE Journal - November 2011 - B26

OpenADR Specif ication
Some readers may be familiar with Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR). OpenADR was developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in trials with California utilities over the last decade. The OpenADR 1.1 specification served as input to the development of Energy Interoperation. OpenADR 2.0 is a subset (a profile) of the larger EI standard. OpenADR 2.0 is intended to benefit utilities and aggregators by enabling DR communications. The focus of OpenADR is on the traditional event-based model, although it allows for communicating real-time price as part of an event signal. This past year has seen the establishment and growth of the OpenADR Alliance (www.openadr.org ), an industry alliance that will provide the education, training, testing and certification needed to bring OpenADR to a wider market. The Alliance will advance demand response and increase the options (products as well as utility programs) available to facility managers. tion for identifying standards gaps and coordinating the effort to develop standards to ﬁll those gaps. In this case, a series of workshops in 2009 highlighted these standards gaps and led to the development of a priority action plan (PAP) to address a price and product information model,8 and another action plan to address DR and Distributed Energy Resources (DER) communications.9 The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards was chosen to develop a new standard (Energy Market Information Exchange, EMIX) as part of the ﬁrst action plan, and another new standard (Energy Interoperation) as part of the second action plan. OASIS EMIX10 provides the information model for representing a price as part of a schedule, and also for representing the details of the product that is being bought or sold. If one is bidding a DR resource into a market, what is the size of the resource, notiﬁcation requirements, time response and duration capabilities, ramp up and down details, etc.? EMIX can represent this information, as well as market requirements for capacity, energy, ancillary services, and any other type of energy product. OASIS Energy Interoperation (EI)11 includes an information model for DR events, and also provides the messages for communicating DR events and market transactions. When communicating price and product information, it encapsulates EMIX payloads. At the time of publication of this article, EI should be in process for SGIP recognition as the standard for DR in its broadest sense—serving the cross-domain interactions discussed earlier in reference to Figure 1. A simpliﬁed picture is shown in Figure 2 where EI serves as a web services-based protocol for communications between the customer ESI and other domains in the Smart Grid. In fact, EI may be used in other domains beyond the customer domain (e.g., for market interactions for bulk generators) as well as within the customer domain. This is discussed more in the following section.
B26

Figure 2: OASIS energy interoperation serves as the direct response and market communication protocol for cross-domain interactions.

OASIS Energy Interoperation
OASIS EI speciﬁes an information model and messages to enable standard communication of: DR events, real-time price, market participation bids and offers (tenders), and load and generation predictions. The standard includes (1) the speciﬁcation document with scope, architecture, and service descriptions including Uniﬁed Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, along with (2) service descriptions in XML schema (web services messages must conform to the schema). The speciﬁcation and schema are all freely available from OASIS.11 The standard version 1.0 is slated to be completed around the time of publication of this article. EI has two main components: demand response communications, and market interactions. A common framework was developed for these two parts, with DR events ﬁtting inside the larger context of market interactions. In the semantics of EI, a market interaction process is shown in Figure 3. The ﬁgure shows where a DR event ﬁts within the context of the transaction process—in this case, the facility owner has a pre-executed options contract that says the owner agrees to take some action when an event is called (exercising the option). The contract was signed earlier at DR program enrollment. Delivery happens when the facility sheds load as veriﬁed by the meter. Most of today’s U.S. energy market interactions take place in the ISO/RTO wholesale markets. The ISO/RTO Council (IRC) worked to build a common perspective among its members on the information exchanges needed to support the business processes of the different ISOs and RTOs along with wholesale DR program and market interaction requirements. This was provided as input to the OASIS EI Technical Committee. In addition to this, the OpenADR speciﬁcation (see sidebar, “OpenADR Speciﬁcation”) represented a solid foundation for retail (that
November 2011

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ASHRAE Journal - November 2011

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