Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) is a research and standards development effort for automated demand response and energy management led by North American research labs and companies. The typical use is to send information and signals to cause electrical power-using devices to be turned off during periods of high demand. In its early phases, the OpenADR research was initiated by Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) which is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The specification was released in April 2009. By contrast, the related OpenHAN standard for home area networks was promoted by utilities themselves and is an attempt to reconcile various home control technologies including X10, Insteon, P1901 and HomePlug. An Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) outreach collaborative was eventually formed in October 2010 and a related OpenADR Alliance [2] "to accelerate the development, adoption and compliance of OpenADR standards throughout the energy industry" and "provide common language" for smart meters. The effort sought publicity for its attempt to unify smart grid plans under a common standards umbrella to form a viable cleantech industry with a relatively level playing field. As NIST and NERC were committed to the OpenADR approach all along and the National Broadband Plan (United States) required (in its "goal 6") open access to consumer power use data by ADR providers, there was probably little doubt of the standards influence.
History The 2000–2001 California electricity crisis served as the impetus for the effort that ultimately led to the creation of version 1.0 of the OpenADR standard. The Demand Response Research Center, which is operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), created the standard with funding from the California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program. Shortly after 2002, the DRRC worked with the California IOUs (SCE, SDG&E and PG&E) to jointly develop this technology through pilots and actual program implementations. In 2009, OpenADR was included in the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Framework, and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) identified OpenADR as a key standard for Demand Response. Additional standards work was performed by the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), which is being tasked by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to oversee standardization of the Smart Grid. The North American Energy Standards Board contributed to the effort by developing a set of requirements. In that same year, the OpenADR specification was released as an official California Energy Commission (CEC) document, and the DRRC donated version 1.0 of the OpenADR standard to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards and the Utilities Communication Architecture (UCA) International Users Group. The work to create version 2.0 of the OpenADR standard is being performed by OASIS through its Energy Interoperation (EI) Technical Committee with assistance from the UCAIug OpenADR Taskforce. Once work is completed on OpenADR version 2.0, with its expanded and complete set of DR and distributed energy resources (DER) signals, the standard will be submitted to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in Geneva, Switzerland for adoption worldwide. IEC is the world's leading organization for international standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies.
Mechanism In the Open Automated Demand Response Communications Specification (Version 1.0), LBNL describes OpenADR as:
“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 pre‐programmed 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.” The specification also describes the scope of the OpenADR standard:
“The Open Automated Demand Response Communications Specification defines the interface to the functions and features of a Demand Response Automation Server (DRAS) that is used to facilitate the automation of customer response to various Demand Response programs and dynamic pricing through a communicating client. This specification, referred to as OpenADR, also addresses how third parties such as utilities, ISOs, energy and facility managers, aggregators, and hardware and software manufacturers will interface to and utilize the functions of the DRAS in order to automate various aspects of demand response (DR) programs and dynamic pricing.” During a Demand Response event, the utility or ISO/RTO provides information to the DRAS about what has changed and on what schedule, such as start and stop times. A typical change would specify one or more of the following:
PRICE_ABSOLUTE – The price per kilowatt‐hour
PRICE_RELATIVE – A change in the price per kilowatt‐hour
PRICE_MULTIPLE – A multiple of a basic rate per kilowatt‐hour
LOAD_AMOUNT – A fixed amount of load to shed or shift
LOAD_PERCENTAGE – The percentage of load to shed or shift
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