The OpenADR Alliance

Haaser: I’ve been working with Honeywell, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pacific Gas & Electric Company and Southern California Edison to establish the OpenADR Alliance. This new organization was created to address an important part of smart grid implementation called open automated demand response, or OpenADR. OpenADR is an open and interoperable information exchange model that enables the automation of Demand Response (DR) signals among utilities, Independent System Operators (ISOs), Regional Transmission Operators (RTOs) or some other entities to customers’ energy management and control systems.

Haaser:  Auto-DR encourages customers to reduce their electricity consumption at critical “peak demand” times, or in response to changes in market price, by automating message delivery from the utility directly to the customer. OpenADR takes this one step further by standardizing on the message format used for Auto-DR so that dynamic price and reliability signals can be delivered in a uniform and interoperable data model among utilities, ISOs and energy management and control systems.

We believe OpenADR will lower the cost, improve the reliability and accelerate the implementation of Auto-DR and Smart Grid worldwide.  This open approach also improves the flexibility of automating demand response, allowing electricity customers to more easily participate in different types of DR programs and pricing structures.

Haaser:  That is the primary problem. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards  (OASIS) is developing an OpenADR standard; the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) is developing data models that feed into the OpenADR standard that is being developed by OASIS; and Utilities Communications Architecture International User’s Group (UCAIug) is working with OASIS and NAESB to develop business requirements, service requirement specifications and service definitions for the OpenADR standard. With more than 60 control vendors implementing OpenADR today, the industry is missing an organization responsible for the education, training, testing and certification needed to bring this technology to market. This is the gap the OpenADR Alliance will fill.

Haaser:  For end-users, such as facility managers and operators, they can reduce the cost, time and risk in the deployment of OpenADR products and systems. Systems integrators and suppliers of control systems can accelerate the time to market, lower development costs and reduce integration costs. Finally, electric utilities and ISOs can achieve faster access to the market, more reliable DR implementation and lower development and integration costs.

Haaser:  I encourage people to visit our website at www.openadr.org for more information on the alliance.

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