Dive Summary:

• The three biggest utilities in California - Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric - are getting behind OpenADR 2.0, the latest version of an open standard to turn demand into grid assets.
• The utilities will start asking their partners to support OpenADR 2.0-certified products and platforms for locational dispatch of both emergency and price-based programs beginning next year.
• OpenADR stems from a Berkeley National Laboratory and California Energy Commission-sponsored project to create an open protocol for communicating utility messages to its customers.

From the article:

OpenADR 2.0 is meant to provide a much more fine-tuned level of communication between utility and end user. The OpenADR Alliance, an industry group including most of the above-named companies, released a 2.0a specification in April.

It’s important to note, however, that the industry is still waiting for OpenADR 2.0b -- a version that includes some of the most critical capabilities, including fast-response times of within 4 seconds, all running over the internet. That last feature will be critical for enlisting buildings in automatically adjusting power usage to balance grid instability, or helping to mitigate the intermittent nature of wind and solar power -- the latter a big issue for California as it seeks to reach 33 percent renewables by the end of the decade. ...