ANSI/CTA-2045 Conformance Testing: Are Smart Appliances Ready for Large-scale Deployment?

Utilities have used residential loads to provide grid services for decades. However, challenges to growing large aggregations of such assets remain due to high costs and negative customer experiences. Modern request/response protocols prioritize customers while enabling participation in grid service programs. Adoption of such protocols better enables Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to participate in grid service programs. To be effective participants, DERs must comply with protocols and conform to the expectations of both utilities and customers. The objective of this paper is to highlight that DERs may not conform to behavior expectations. We place grid-enabled water heaters under varying conditions to observe resulting behaviors in response to service requests. The results of this study show that protocol compliance alone does not guarantee practical use of DERs, nor does it provide an improved experience for customers. By considering DER behavior conformance in addition to protocol compliance, utilities can better design DERs-based grid service programs.