OpenADR Alliance
An Open And Standardized Way To Securely Communicate Demand Response Signals

In less than four years, The OpenADR Alliance is recognized as an influential industry alliance helping to automate and simplify DR (Demand Response) for the power industry with dynamic price and reliability signals. This allows end users to modify their usage patterns to save money while enhancing the effectiveness of power delivered across the Smart Grid.

Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) is an open and standardized way for electricity providers and system operators to securely communicate DR signals with each other and with their customers using a common language over any existing IP-based communications network, such as the Internet. As the most comprehensive standard for Automated Demand Response, OpenADR has achieved widespread support throughout the industry.

Today, The OpenADR Alliance has over 100 members including leading technology, utility and control vendors from around the world. Its mission is to foster global development, adoption,and compliance of OpenADR standards through collaboration, education, testing, and certification. The Board of Directors currently comprises members from Southern California Edison (SCE), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), AutoGrid, EnerNOC and Honeywell, providing leadership and direction necessary to guide the Alliance and actively participate in setting the strategic objectives and operating policies for the consortium.

“The work performed by the OpenADR Alliance compliments the work of entities such as The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), and other government agencies to expand the adoption of the OpenADR standard,” says Carl Besaw, Senior Project Manager with SCE and Chairman of the OpenADR Alliance.

The OpenADR Alliance recently announced a major milestone with the release of the OpenADR 2.0b Profile Specification, a full-featured specification for complex energy management solutions supporting demand response and distributed energy resource (DER) management for both wholesale and retail programs. The OpenADR 2.0b Profile Specification builds upon the OpenADR 2.0a Profile Specification released in August 2012 for simple devices such as thermostats, and adds enhanced DR event and price scheduling, robust reporting services and a number of operational and administrative functionalities to simplify customer participation management and system registration.

Interest in the OpenADR standard is spreading to Asian countries where the significant support for OpenADR 2.0 underscores the growing global momentum of the company.

The OpenADR Alliance brings together stakeholders to facilitate and accelerate the use and adoption of this standard. Unfortunately, existing propriety solutions - the majority with manual processes - add unnecessary cost and complexity, as well as missed opportunities for optimizing the value of DR. In fact, in the United States alone, an estimated 95 percentage of commercial DR programs still rely on these manual processes.