IEEE Electrification - September 2021 - 85

way to tell how much energy
consumption was really curtailed
after an event was called. The use
of one-way pagers and dialing
machines even eliminated that
initial feedback. It was also
almost impossible to review the
change in power consumption
after the fact without advanced
metering infrastructure and
smart meters. Basically, the utilities
had to rely on readings in
their substations, overall power consumption on the
grid, and data based on previous experiences. This
might have been enough in these early days, but it
would not be sustainable over time.
For at-scale
adoption globally,
technology
developments must
be coupled with
standardization.
Advisor Matthew Tisdale said, " If
California had already seriously
embraced flexible demand response,
it would not have even come close
to blackouts. "
Therefore, after the crisis was contained,
the California Energy Commission
(CEC: https://www.energy
.ca.gov/) identified the need for a better,
faster, and more scalable communication
mechanism for DR, in
particular, to eliminate the need for
2) Scalability: There is a limited number of larger consumers
that can be controlled using these manual
processes. Even with dialing machines, fax machines,
and pagers, the number of people you can reach during
a limited time period is not very large. Remember,
at this time residential and small-medium businesses
had very little automation and connectivity beyond
the phone line. Onboarding was different for every
customer and required significant effort.
3) No harmonization: Every utility essentially built their
own program with different parameters and objectives.
While this is in principle not a bad thing, it also
meant that suppliers and integrators would customize
solutions as needed which created higher cost and
long implementation timelines despite the relatively
low amount of technology involved.
Then the 2000/2001 energy crisis hit California and
other western states and things changed. Due to market
manipulations, mainly by companies like Enron, California
ran into supply shortages and increased energy prices-up
to 800% in the year 2000. Rolling blackouts
circulated around the state to make up for the shortages,
which affected businesses and private entities alike. As a
result of capped retail electricity prices, Pacific Gas and
Electric Company (PG&E) had to declare bankruptcy and
Southern California Edison (SCE) only just escaped the
same fate. The crisis is estimated to have caused US$40-45
billion in losses.
Preliminary research from a California Public Utility
Commission (CPUC) analysis of the blackouts determined
that, as stated by the CPUC Deputy Executive
Director for Energy and Climate Policy Edward Randolph
(https://www.utilitydive.com/news/demand
-response-failed-california-20-years-ago-the-states
-recent-outages/584878/), even the still small amount of
available DR " contributed quite a bit to grid support "
and " This is the first event in many years that required
sustained DR. The analysis of its performance will
inform future decision-making. " More emphatically,
Gridworks Executive Director and former CPUC Energy
rolling blackouts and instead replace them with targeted
and automated DR events. The CEC's Public Interest
Energy Research program created a general funding
opportunity (GFO) to entice companies to become creative
and offer solutions to the state of California. The
Demand Response Research Center (https://buildings
.lbl.gov/demand-response), which is managed by
the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL:
https://www.lbl.gov/) and the company Akuacom (later
Honeywell) took on the project and worked with the
California investor-owned utilities (IOUs)-SCE, San
Diego Gas & Electric, and PG&E-to create the first standard
for DR communications, OpenADR 1.0. LBNL
describes the standard as (Piette et al., 2009)
... a communications data model designed to facilitate
sending and receiving DR signals from a utility
or independent system operator to electric customers.
The intention of the data model is to interact
with building and industrial control systems that
are preprogrammed to take action based on a DR
signal, enabling a demand response event to be
fully automated, with no manual intervention. The
OpenADR specification is a highly flexible infrastructure
design to facilitate common information
exchange between a utility or Independent System
Operator (ISO) and their end‐use participants. The
concept of an open specification is intended
to allow anyone to implement the signaling systems,
providing the automation server or the automation
clients.
OpenADR 1.0 offered an implementable way to quickly
and effectively communicate between a management
server at the utility [often referred to as a DR access server
(DRAS), a term later trademarked by Honeywell] and a client
device at the resource side. Implementation started
between 2005 and 2006. The standard was, however,
focused on existing or newly implemented DR programs
in California and was also limited to Akuacom/Honeywell
and their partner companies.
As the Smart Grid efforts increased after 2005, more
emphasis was put on interoperability and the creation of
common standards. The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel
(SGIP) was tasked by the U.S. National Institute of Standards
and Technology to oversee standardization of the
IEEE Electrification Magazine / SEPTEMBER 2021
85

https://www.energy.ca.gov/ https://www.energy.ca.gov/ https://buildings.lbl.gov/demand-response https://buildings.lbl.gov/demand-response https://www.lbl.gov/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/demand-response-failed-california-20-years-ago-the-states-recent-outages/584878/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/demand-response-failed-california-20-years-ago-the-states-recent-outages/584878/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/demand-response-failed-california-20-years-ago-the-states-recent-outages/584878/

IEEE Electrification - September 2021

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