ASHRAE Journal - November 2011 - B30

Smart Grid standards efforts are helping to foster this adoption. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recognized the need for standardizing how demand response signals are sent to enable broader demand response participation.1 To that end, NIST also issued a priority action plan (PAP 09) based on the need for standards for demand response signals. Several organizations have responded to meet the call, and among those is the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a non-proﬁt consortium driving the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the Smart Grid. Speciﬁcally, OASIS is developing an energy interoperation standard currently in public review and awaiting adoption. At the foundation of the OASIS energy interoperation standard is the OpenADR 1.0 speciﬁcation, developed in 2002 as a joint project between the Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) and the state of California to establish an open communications speciﬁcation to automate demand response.2 The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and utilities began broadly adopting the speciﬁcation in 2007. That same year, NIST identiﬁed the OpenADR 1.0 speciﬁcation as a key speciﬁcation for Smart Grid communications over the Internet as part of its roadmap.3 Since that time, the speciﬁcation has been adopted throughout the controls industry. For example, one provider of OpenADR-based technology, offers a client development program in which vendors can develop, test and demonstrate their ability to receive and consume OpenADR-based signals. To date, that program has enrolled more than 100 vendors. The OpenADR message set is being further developed through NIST’s Smart Grid-standards effort, and the OASIS Energy Interoperation standard. Similar to standards development within the buildings industry, the trend points toward open standards for the beneﬁts they bring—including interoperability and vendor neutrality. They also help ensure assets are not left stranded, future-prooﬁng technology investments. This open standards approach helps ensure the necessary interoperability between technologies and software systems to deliver the promise of the Smart Grid to commercial and industrial business already managed by a range of building automation and control systems. The OpenADR Alliance, a nonproﬁt group created to foster the development, adoption, and compliance of OpenADR, is supporting this trend through efforts to foster industry collaboration to lower the cost, improve the reliability and accelerate the beneﬁts of Smart Grid implementations. Driven by founding members including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Paciﬁc Gas & Electric Company, Southern California Edison and Honeywell, the alliance aims to ensure a solid technical foundation for Smart Grid deployments using the OpenADR speciﬁcation.

Figure 1: Real-time energy use (red) and baseline (blue) provided by demand response automation software for a fulfillment services company in California. munications gateway over the Internet from the utility to the facility, is just the ﬁrst step to a facility’s involvement in the program. Facilities must also consider the necessary architectural prerequisites to ensure a building can receive and respond to the pricing signals received during an event. The right building controls architecture provides the critical link to facilitating automated load reduction in response to utility price changes and demand response events. Using the set OpenADR message, the utility uses demand response automation software to send price and reliability signals over the Internet to an OpenADR gateway controller at the facility. The controller, in turn, interprets the message and initiates preprogrammed load reductions in select control systems, overriding the system’s current setting to a predeﬁned, more energy-efﬁcient setting. Energy service providers can help facilities audit their energy load and design and implement these two-way communicating control systems. For example, if the price of electricity is most expensive from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., an automated demand response-enabled controls architecture can curb usage on select pieces of building equipment based on established parameters and save the facility money. This might entail dimming lights, increasing temperature setpoints or cycling air conditioners. Energy service companies can help facilities establish shed strategies to help maximize savings and ensure business processes are not disrupted by the usage shifts. An ice cream distributor most likely cannot curtail usage of many chillers in its warehouse, whereas a paper warehouse might be able to do so without affecting regular business processes. Each, however, likely can increase their air conditioning setpoints by two degrees. While many facilities currently lack the necessary building automation equipment, facility managers who opt into programs at this time can often receive low- or no-cost building system upgrades and expert implementation—a bonus for participating, on multiple levels. The Internet connection a facility uses to receive the utility’s signals can be established through a hard-wired connecNovember 2011

A Setup for Success
Opting into an automated demand response program based on the OpenADR speciﬁcation, which will establish a comB30

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ASHRAE Journal - November 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASHRAE Journal - November 2011