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The authors would like to thank the Technical Advisory Group (listed below) for their assistance in this document. We also want to acknowledge Chris Scruton, Ivin Rhyne, Kristy Chew, Martha Brook, and Mike Gravely at the California Energy Commission along with Ron Hofmann and Roger Levy, consultants to the California Energy Commission and LBNL, and David Watson, former LBNL employee, for their ongoing support. We also want to thank Nance Matson for her assistance in finalizing this document. i Preface The California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program supports public interest energy research and development that will help improve the quality of life in California by bringing environmentally safe, affordable, and reliable energy services and products to the marketplace. The PIER Program conducts public interest research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) projects to benefit California. The PIER Program strives to conduct the most promising public interest energy research by partnering with RD&D entities, including individuals, businesses, utilities, and public or private research institutions.

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This paper describes the concept for and lessons from the development and field-testing of an open, interoperable communications infrastructure to support automated demand response (auto-DR). Automating DR allows greater levels of participation, improved reliability, and repeatability of the DR in participating facilities. This paper also presents the technical and architectural issues associated with auto-DR and description of the demand response automation server (DRAS), the client/server architecture-based middle-ware used to automate the interactions between the utilities or any DR serving entity and their customers for DR programs. Use case diagrams are presented to show the role of the DRAS between utility/ISO and the clients at the facilities.

Measured energy performance data are essential to national efforts to improve building efficiency, as evidenced in recent benchmarking mandates, and in a growing body of work that indicates the value of permanent monitoring and energy information feedback. This paper presents case studies of energy information systems (EIS) at four enterprises and university campuses, focusing on the attained energy savings, and successes and challenges in technology use and integration. EIS are broadly defined as performance monitoring software, data acquisition hardware, and communication systems to store, analyze, and display building energy information. Case investigations showed that the most common energy savings and instances of waste concerned scheduling errors, measurement and verification, and inefficient operations. Data quality is critical to effective EIS use, and is most challenging at the subsystem or component level, and with nonelectric energy sources. Sophisticated prediction algorithms may not be well understood but can be applied quite effectively, and sites with custom benchmark models or metrics are more likely to perform analyses external to the EIS. Finally, resources and staffing were identified as a universal challenge, indicating a need to identify additional models of EIS use that extend beyond exclusive in-house use, to analysis services.

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Distributed power systems in the U.S. and globally are evolving to provide reliable and clean energy to consumers. In California, existing regulations require significant increases in renewable generation, as well as identification of customer-side distributed energy resources (DER) controls, communication technologies, and standards for interconnection with the electric grid systems. As DER deployment expands, customer-side DER control and optimization will be critical for system flexibility and demand response (DR) participation, which improves the economic viability of DER systems. Current DER systems integration and communication challenges include leveraging the existing DER and DR technology and systems infrastructure, and enabling optimized cost, energy and carbon choices for customers to deploy interoperable grid transactions and renewable energy systems at scale. This paper presents a cost-effective solution to these challenges by exploring communication technologies and information models for DER system integration and interoperability. This system uses open standards and optimization models for resource planning based on dynamic-pricing notifications and autonomous operations within various domains of the smart grid energy system. It identifies architectures and customer engagement strategies in dynamic DR pricing transactions to generate feedback information models for load flexibility, load profiles, and participation schedules. The models are tested at a real site in California-Fort Hunter Liggett (FHL). The results for FHL show that the model fits within the existing and new DR business models and networked systems for transactive energy concepts. Integrated energy systems, communication networks, and modeling tools that coordinate supply-side networks and DER will enable electric grid system operators to use DER for grid transactions in an integrated system.