Dive Brief:
- The North American Energy Standards Board announced Thursday it will work with the U.S. Department of Energy and two of its national laboratories to "harmonize grid service terminology and definitions" to accelerate the integration of distributed energy resources in organized markets.
- The work will be incorporated into standards development already underway to support the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's efforts to remove barriers to storage and distributed resource participation in wholesale energy markets, including through Orders 841 and 2222.
- DOE, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory requested on May 2 that NAESB identify a set of common grid services. The national labs said a "lack of common industry terminology regarding grid services can be a roadblock to the interoperability of distributed energy resources."
Dive Insight:
NAESB said its standards development "will promote more efficient wholesale and retail electric market operations," ultimately enabling more distributed resources to participate.
The standards board said its efforts will "build upon existing wholesale market structures by standardizing common grid service names, definitions, and performance characteristics that align with the market product taxonomies and definitions" that FERC uses in its quarterly reports.
FERC approved Order 2222 in 2020 to allow greater participation of DERs in regional wholesale power markets. Order 841 was issued in 2018 to address market compensation for the storage sector.
NAESB said new standards "will enable wholesale market operators to associate or classify existing market products with common grid services and support more efficient communications" between market participants including generators, distribution system operators and distributed energy resource aggregators.
Work to develop new standards will be initiated by NAESB's Wholesale Electric Quadrant and Retail Markets Quadrant. The former effort will launch first in a kickoff meeting scheduled for June 14. The board said the retail market initiative is expected to begin standards development later this year.
"Once developed, the standards applicable to the wholesale electric market can provide a foundation for the development of similar retail electric standards which will serve to assist emerging retail markets to integrate, with greater consistency, the flexibilities that can be realized from distributed energy resources," NAESB said in its announcement.
Grid operators have already been working to incorporate Orders 841 and 2222 into their rules. On Twitter, observers questioned if NAESB's work would duplicate ongoing efforts in regional markets.
"Did DOE ask the DER industry if NAESB is the right entity, and if they are resources to participate there? Or will this be another instance of utilities writing the standards with their own interests in mind?" Advanced Energy Economy Managing Director Jeff Dennis mused in a tweet.
Representatives from the national laboratories said a lack of standard terminology can slow DER integration.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say the request to advance standards was made on behalf of the DOE-funded Grid Modernization Lab Consortium.
"NAESB standardization of grid service definitions could provide a foundation for a common framework that would simplify distributed energy resource integration and enable the comparison of grid service usage across the markets, leading to improved accuracy and consistency of information concerning grid service performance and metrics," the labs said in a statement.
