The Smart Grid is an industry transformation – a transformation that is shifting the business and operational models used by utilities from a siloed approach to a more cohesive one. Wave 1 of the Smart Grid infrastructure, occurring now, involves the acquisition and deployment of advanced metering communications systems for 2-way connectivity to energy consumers, communication between the utility and the home.

The second wave, also starting now, utilizes the connectivity established in Wave 1 to collect and manage massive amounts of consumption and performance data. This wave begins the installation of systems that utilize this information for operations, demand response and customer empowerment.

The final wave, Wave 3, tightly integrates the command and control infrastructure with the transmission and distribution control infrastructure for adv­anced Smart Grid control appli­cations. It’s during this wave that the Demand Response Mana­gement Solution (DRMS) comes in as the critical infrastructure compo­nent – linking the utility back office to its customers.

Demand response (DR) is becoming an ever-increasing asset in the Smart Grid ecosystem. While these assets are critical to the ability of customers to make choices to potentially reduce their energy consumption, they are vital to the operations of many electric utilities for peak load management, economic control and distribution system operations and optimization. Making this linkage between the utility back office to its customers involves more than protocols, standards and common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). It requires a platform capable of adapting to ever-changing business needs while remaining focused on providing the infrastructure for both command and control as well as customer empowerment.

A New Breed of Utility Enterprise Application
The ability to control, operate and monitor remote assets has fostered a new breed of system called a Demand Response Management System. The DRMS is not much unlike legacy load management systems as an operational system used to control distributed DR resources.

However, new and advanced features will help this new breed of technology keep pace with the momentum toward the Smart Grid:

• Open standards based system rather than a proprietary one;
• Management of millions of endpoints, versus hundreds of thousands;
• 2-way communications and verification rather than 1-way; and
• Integration between the AMI/SmartGrid network and the utility back office systems.

From an enterprise systems point of view, the DRMS falls into a category of an information management system much like the Meter Data Management System and connects the flow of information to the DR devices to/from the utility, leveraging the SmartGrid/AMI network. As the critical linkage between the DR resources and the utilty back office, there are critical functional elements that must be supported:

• All Customer Classes: Utilities investing in DR are doing so across all customer classes. The DRMS solution for most utilities needs to be a complete solution for all customer classes and cases. Additionally, it should represent the state-of-the-art in a portfolio management toolset for these resources.
• Utility Operations: The DRMS becomes the link from utility systems such as the Customer Information System and the Distribution Management System.
• Device Agnostic: In the not too distant future, the market will be flooded with devices for DR and customer interaction. DRMS platforms must embrace the use of these devices in a agnostic manner, breaking the mould of proprietary systems and control 3rd-party devices.
• System of Record (SoR) for the Home Area Network (HAN): All utilities talk about the system of record for billing systems. The new system will require a complete SoR for HAN devices as well.
• Platform Approach: The DRMS platform is not a single solu­tion but rather a platform for the next generation of systems; an expandable system as new opportunities emerge.
• Multi-Devices, Multi-Protocol, Multi-Network: Migrating from legacy technologies will require time, patience and a strategy that encompasses the ability to manage legacy systems as well as new systems. Although the feature sets maybe different, the DRMS must manage this transition.
• Link to Customer Portals and Information Systems: The DRMS must maintain active records of customer devices and manage them on behalf of the utility. Critical to the success of the DRMS concept is being able to integrate with customer facing systems. These portals provide customers with valuable, decision-making, information.

Current and Future Issues
The need for a DRMS is clear, as are the functionalities required to support the emerging SmartGrid transformation. However, the industry is currently grappling with some looming issues, the most serious of which are those already being considered in current design efforts, such as security. But others – found less frequently in today’s headlines – will also greatly impact our work, moving forward.

Security: The North American Electric Reliability Council NERC has implemented standards that are requirements for the secu­rity and reliable operation of energy capacity systems, including DRMS systems. Any utility looking to implement large- scale demand response must review and adhere to the standards established by the North American Electric Reliability Company (NERC).

Security beyond the control room and into the homes gets dicey, however. Communication networks need to extend into customers’ homes and provide secure access to systems and information about those customers.

In today’s electronic age this is enough to make any utility executive nervous. Some of the best electronic security resources in the world are working to ensure that the standards used are robust and reliable. This is exactly why any enterprise solution needs standards and technology that not only works with the latest information technology security standards, but also provides a certain upgrade path once security changes are enacted.

Data Integrity: When Automatic Meter Reading (AMR), Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and remote AMR systems were first installed in North America, the Meter Data Management System was born out of necessity to collect and process the vast amounts of meter data being collected. Just like the MDMS industry before it, the DRMS evolution will slowly begin to manage the data coming from and going to HAN devices. Immediately, this raises the question of data integrity across systems without massive data replication. The DRMS must be designed to plug into the Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) of today’s back office utility and provide seamless utilization of the data from the Customer Information System or MDMS without data replication.

It’s not an easy task. Today’s SOA interfaces are still emerging and standardization is only beginning. The industry needs reference installations, which provide the basis for examining the positives and negatives involved in the integration as well as solid performance metrics. A vendor/customer partnership approach enables continuous improvement along a path to an optimal solution.

Multiple Competing Standards: Standards are being talking about all over the world, and it’s a confusing world full of new acronyms, players, consultants and companies. While overwhelming at times and competitive at others, standards organizations are all working toward the same goal. Much like industries before ours, the goal is for vendor interoperability and collaboration without the installation of custom systems. Standards collaboration is a must and the industry needs to embrace the work these organizations are doing. Participation is encouraged; but more important are that the conver­sations occur at appro­priate levels of abstrac­tion. It’s important for all standards organizations to work at the level that suits the application.

For example, when speci­fying a protocol the bits and bytes are important, however, when specifying a business integration framework, the bits and bytes are less important with work flow comes taking precedence. It’s a delicate balance but one that the industry will need to develop and embrace.

Scalability and the Economies of Scale: All Smart Grid systems are under the scrutiny of “full scale” operations yet only small scale systems are currently deployed, particu­larly for DRMS systems. As such, the industry should be exami­ning how systems are tested and verified for operations at scale and how the system is designed to operate with large-scale systems. Scalability is a problem that doesn’t always scale linearly. In fact, systems operating perfect at 100,000 points may not scale to 1 million points and usually, if they fail, do so miserably.

Unfortunately, there are hundreds of factors that can influence the scalability of a DRMS system, from the hardware to the communications network to design of the application protocol. They all impact how the system must behave to deliver messages to the end devices. Similar to the problems the industry has seen in transmission and control operations, AMI systems needed to work on the scalability of consuming communications from endpoints over a controlled communications network. The DRMS scalability problem is based on sending commands and controls to endpoints over a communications network that is not managed by the DRMS itself.

All of these issues point to the necessity for longevity in the industry and experience and knowledge of the technology. While many of these issues will take years to come to resolution, a customer/vendor relationship that is built on a partnership approach that will enable solutions to be established and objectives aligned.

Conclusion
Not all utilities will transition through these waves at the same time and, in fact, many are just at beginning of that process. But the waves of change are clearly emerging. The Smart Grid trans­formation is in full swing, and the introduction of assets that enable reliability and economic control will create a host of issues and concerns that must be addressed. As such, the DRMS has been born as the information system technology that links the electric utility back office to the consumer. Careful consideration of the technology and partners must be carefully considered, especially while the industry remains in the current state of flux and changes continue to evolve.

About the Author
Arthur (Bud) Vos is Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Strategy for Comverge, a leading provider of comprehensive smart grid, demand management, and energy efficiency solutions for over 20 years. Vos has been extensively involved in the electric utility industry for more than ten years, including the development of demand response offerings based on real-time monitoring and control technology, strategic sales to electric utilities, alliances and joint product and development offerings.