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Automated Demand Response a Better Way to Shave Peak Load
April 4, 2012
This is Casey Laughman, managing editor of Building Operating Management magazine. Today's tip is that automated demand response can help manage your power usage.
The California energy crisis of the late 1990s exposed broad weaknesses in existing utility demand-response capabilities.
Issues included lack of availability and reliable performance, utility control strategies that often conflicted with occupant comfort and business operating requirements, and incompatibilities with existing building energy management systems. Utility-provided control switches often had limited functionality, and event notification for commercial buildings often required building operators to be present, to acknowledge signals, and to manually manage response settings.
The Open Automated Demand Response information exchange specification, known as OpenADR, was developed to reduce the cost, expand the availability, and improve the effectiveness and value of DR. OpenADR redefines conventional DR to make it more scalable and flexible. OpenADR also transfers decision making and control from the utility to the customer and integrates DR with existing building energy management and control systems. OpenADR is on track to become a national standard, which will further reduce costs and expand support among energy service providers and building system and controls vendors.
With automated demand response, price and reliability signals are communicated directly to existing energy management and controls systems or end-use equipment controllers. Facility managers develop pre-determined DR strategies based on an energy audit or building commissioning. These are automatically activated in response to price and reliability events. This approach allows facility managers to design response strategies that are consistent with business operations, tenant comfort and lease requirements.
Linking event signals to existing energy management systems provides facility managers with control and flexibility to develop more sophisticated response strategies encompassing a range of loads. While Auto-DR enables facility managers to opt-out of any event, the machine-to-machine automated approach eliminates the need to curtail loads manually.