Smart Grid industry organizations this week announced the formation of the OpenADR Alliance, a nonprofit corporation created to foster the adoption of a Smart Grid standard known as Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR).
Industry standards are expected to lower the cost, improve the reliability and accelerate the speed of Auto-DR and Smart Grid implementations across the U.S.
Auto-DR encourages businesses and homeowners 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 standardizes a message format used for Auto-DR so that dynamic price and reliability signals can be delivered in a uniform model among utilities, Independent System Operator (ISOs) and customer’s energy management and control systems.
More than 60 control vendors across the U.S. and internationally have already implemented OpenADR.
While the benefits of widespread adoption are clear, the industry previously lacked an organization responsible for the education, training, testing and certification needed to bring the technology to market.
The OpenADR Alliance aims to foster the collaboration necessary among industry stakeholders to ensure the rapid deployment of OpenADR. National standards work will be built upon the OpenADR specifications published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and funded by the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program.
OpenADR is being further developed through the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Smart Grid-standards effort, along with organizations including: Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the Utilities Communications Architecture International User’s Group (UCAIug), and the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB).
“There’s no question the widespread adoption of an OpenADR standard will lower the development, equipment and service costs for Smart Grid vendors and the utilities investing in these solutions,” said Jeremy Eaton, vice president of energy solutions at Honeywell (NYSE: HON). “And it will ultimately benefit homeowners and businesses because open standards spur competition and innovation, and will lead to more effective Smart Grid technologies, and greater energy and cost savings.”
The OpenADR Alliance said it intends to work with related organizations such as the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB), Utilities Communications Architecture International User’s Group (UCAIug), Wi-Fi Alliance™, Zigbee Alliance™ and others as appropriate.
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