Role of Standard Demand Response Signals for Advanced Automated Aggregation

Emerging standards such as OpenADR enable Demand Response (DR) Resources to interact directly with Utilities and Independent System Operators to allow their facility automation equipment to respond to a variety of DR signals ranging from day ahead to real time ancillary services. In addition, there are Aggregators in today’s markets who are capable of bringing together collections of aggregated DR assets and selling them to the grid as a single resource. However, in most cases these aggregated resources are not automated and when they are, they typically use proprietary technologies. There is a need for a framework for dealing with aggregated resources that supports the following requirements:

• Allows demand-side resources to participate in multiple DR markets ranging from wholesale ancillary services to retail tariffs without being completely committed to a single entity like an Aggregator
• Allow aggregated groups of demand-side resources to be formed in an ad hoc fashion to address specific grid-side issues and support the optimization of the collective response of an aggregated group along a number of different dimensions. This is important in order to taylor the aggregated performance envelope to the needs to of the grid.
• Allow aggregated groups to be formed in a hierarchical fashion so that each group can participate in variety of markets from wholesale ancillary services to distribution level retail tariffs.

This paper explores the issues of aggregated groups of DR resources as described above especially within the context of emerging smart grid standards and the role they will play in both the management and interaction of various grid-side entities with those resources.