Experiencing Commercialized Automated Demand Response Services with a Small Building Customer in Energy Market

An Automated Demand Response is the most fundamental energy service that contributes to balancing the power demand with the supply, in which it realizes extensive interoperations between the power consumers and the suppliers. The OpenADR specification has been developed to facilitate the service communications, and several facilities offer primitive forms of services in a retail market. However, few researches have reported the details of such a real-world service yet, and thus we are still unaware of how it works exactly. Instead, we rely on our textbooks to design next generations of the ADR service. To overcome the discrepancy of our understanding, this paper shares our hand-on experiences on the commercialized ADR service. In particular, we deploy smart submeters to manage energy loads and install an energy management system in a small commercial facility, helping the owner participate in the ADR service that a local utility offers. The building owner makes a service contract with a qualified load aggregator based on her curtailment rate, a reference point that decides the success of her load curtailment. With the rate, the customer facility participates in three DR events for tests that last for 2, 1, and 3 hours, respectively. Our experimental results are illustrated with discussions on various aspects of the service.