(232b) Standards for Automated Demand Response Communications

Significant advances have been made in the past year toward standardized communications between energy providers and energy users. While electric utilities have been offering a wide variety of programs to curtail load in times of stress on the electric grid, there have been no standards for program parameters, nor methods for communicating between utility and customer. In the past year there has been an effort to bring the utility and facility industries together and agree on communication technology and messages to allow for standard communications. The standard provides for automated demand response where a customer's facility energy management system can follow pre-programmed energy reduction measures in response to utility signals. These signals might be an event notice or real time price update. The benefits of this for industrial customers are the potential for participating in standard programs with multiple energy providers, reduced cost of energy management systems and hardware, and thus more options for implementing demand response in the industrial facility.

This paper introduces the automated demand response communication standard and progress toward becoming a national standard. The role of BACnet (Building Automation and Controls Network communication standard) in this effort, the tools within BACnet that serve demand response communications, and the place of BACnet relative to the industrial customer will also be discussed. Finally some examples will be given how these standards can be used by the industrial customer to implement automated demand response.