Open Automated Demand Response Communications in Demand Response for Wholesale Ancillary Services

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is conducting a pilot program to investigate the technical feasibility of bidding certain demand response (DR) resources into the California Independent System Operator’s (CAISO) day-ahead market for ancillary services non-spinning reserve. Three facilities, a retail store, a local government office building, and a bakery, are recruited into the pilot program. For each facility, hourly demand, and load curtailment potential are forecasted two days ahead and submitted to the CAISO the day before the operation as an available resource. These DR resources are optimized against all other generation resources in the CAISO ancillary service. Each facility is equipped with four-second real time telemetry equipment to ensure resource accountability and visibility to CAISO operators. When CAISO requests DR resources, PG&E’s OpenADR (Open Automated DR) communications infrastructure is utilized to deliver DR signals to the facilities’ energy management and control systems (EMCS). The pre-programmed DR strategies are triggered without a human in the loop. This paper describes the automated system architecture and the flow of information to trigger and monitor the performance of the DR events. We outline the DR strategies at each of the participating facilities. At one site a real time electric measurement feedback loop is implemented to assure the delivery of CAISO dispatched demand reductions. Finally, we present results from each of the facilities and discuss findings.