Smart grid and customer transactions: The unrealized benefits of conformance

Smart Grid investments and research promise significant benefits to both customers and the grid. One major benefit is data and communications that enable customer-side resources to participate in electricity programs - i.e., transact with the electric grid. The U.S. Smart Grid activities and investments, which account for nearly three billion dollars in publicly documented expenses, build on interoperability standards activity. Standards interoperability for grid transactions can be viewed from two key interfaces - between (1) Smart Grid domain interfaces, and (2) customer-side resources and the electric grid. Conformance testing and certification is key to ensuring that standards are interoperable and secure. This paper describes the conformance development and certification process for a key communications standard - Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) - as an interface between customers' systems and electricity service providers, to enable demand response and price transactions. Through this process, we describe the benefits of conformance to support low-cost automated DR (AutoDR) and customer-side transactions within the distribution electric grid. The paper evaluates examples of applications and further developments for emerging transactive energy concepts that can be used to scale existing systems and to leverage the investments and support compliance to any building codes and appliance standards. The conformance process can be the key to realizing interoperability benefits and market acceptance. Conformance is also a key to enabling native DR and price transaction capabilities in customers' systems; a feature that can be replicated for diffusion and can lower DR technology costs by a significant margin.