Demand Response: The Standards Race Begins?

Greentech Media ( 11/12, St. John) - LBNL’s OpenADR is a standard to make automated demand response and real-time power pricing quick and easy. Is the fragmented market ready for it?
Demand response – turning down power at factories, offices and homes to save energy and meet utility peak demands. It's the "killer application" for the smart grid, according to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff, capable of saving up to 188 gigawatts of power, or about 20 percent of the country's overall peak energy use (see FERC report).

But the real-world business of demand response is a highly fragmented affair, ranging from cutting-edge automated automation and communication technologies to old stand-bys of pager messages, phone calls, emails and price lists posted on public websites.

Smart grid proponents agree that standards to automate demand response – and link it with new variable pricing schemes – could open up this fragmented market to broader competition, improving efficiency and lowering cost for utilities and customers alike. But on what standards might this killer app of the future be built?

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has an answer – OpenADR, or open automated demand response. The lab has tested OpenADR with California utilities Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, which have agreed to use it for some direct utility-to-customer demand response programs.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency setting standards for smart grid deployments, has named OpenADR an early leader in the field of making all this possible (see Smart Grid Standards Roadmap Unveiled).

But it could take some time for a new standard to infiltrate the existing demand response market, which already accounts for about 41 gigawatts of power as of December 2008, or about 5.8 percent of nationwide peak power demand, according to FERC.

For a sense of how long it might take, however, Zak pointed to the industrial automation market, which has been the domain of proprietary systems from big corporations like General Electric and Siemens.

"Even today, although they all say they've got Ethernet, it's still their own flavor of Ethernet," he said. "I'm afraid you're going to get these different people who have some skin in the game on this, and want to subtly try to lock in their technology. So we'll see."